t
surprising that they should have attempted to exercise this power in
defence of the royal prerogative. But with the Revolution of 1688, which
established the supremacy of Parliament, the last trace of the judicial
negative disappeared. From that time on the right of Parliament to be
the constitutional judge of its own powers has not been seriously
questioned. Even the veto power of the King soon became obsolete, though
in theory it for a time survived.

Such was the constitutional status of the English judiciary when the
American colonies asserted their independence. The new state
constitutions adopted at the outbreak of the war, as has been shown in a
previous chapter, represented the more democratic thought of the period
and were really revolutionary in character. They abolished the veto
power of the governor and failed to abolish the judicial negative only
because it did not then exist.[64] This was followed after the
Revolution by a conservative reaction which was not, however, a popular
movement. It received no general support or sympathy from the masses of
the people, but was planned and carried through by those whom we may
describe as the ruling class, and who were, for the most part, strongly
in sympathy with English political institutions. It was characterized by
real, if not avowed, hostility to the new political ideas embodied in
the Declaration of Independence and in the Revolutionary state
constitutions. Its aim was to reform the state governments by restoring,
as far as possible, the checks on democracy which the Revolutionary
movement had swept away.

The judiciary was the only branch of the state government in which the
principle of life tenure had been retained, and therefore the only one
which could be depended on to offer any effectual resistance to public
opinion. Evidently, then, the easiest and most practicable method of
accomplishing the end which the conservative classes had in view was to
enlarge the powers of the judiciary. Accordingly an effort was made at
this time in several of the states to revive and develop the judicial
veto. A practical argument in favor of this check was doubtless the fact
that it required no formal changes in the state constitutions, and, for
this reason, was less likely to arouse formidable opposition than any
avowed attempt to restore the system of checks.

When the Constitutional Convention met in 1787 the courts in five states
were beginning to claim the power