... (N)one can be in any doubt in the future as to the course that the President — any President — must follow when the troops of a state are used to nullify the Constitution and laws of the United States, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, and to deny the orders of the courts of the United States. No President can abandon the positions taken and sustained by Abraham Lincoln through four years of bitter Civil War.

The significance of the President's action is that the grand design commands the respect of the most powerful as well as the least powerful regardless of how they might feel about the judicial rationale of the decision they must follow. The separate independent judicial branch created by the design is particularly important to the powerless, for as Madison said in The Federalist No. 47:

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

By the division of governing powers, such an accumulation of powers is prevented, particularly by the traditionally more powerful legislative and executive branches.

As Justice Stone put it in a 1936 dissent in United States v. Butler, "...unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive and legislative branches of the government is subject to judicial restraint...." So is such an exercise by the states subject to Supreme Court restraint under the Supremacy Clause making the Constitution the supreme law of the land.

The design also removes temptation to violate the law from the most powerful, as well as the less powerful, by providing peaceful means of changing it. First, there is