Marshall avoided both problems and solved the dilemma. First, he ruled that Madison's withholding of Marbury's commission was illegal, which pleased the Federalists. However, he ultimately held that the Court could not give Marbury his requested writ of mandamus, which gave Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans the result they desired. But, in what the American legal scholar Laurence Tribe described as "an oft-told tale ... remains awe-inspiring", Marshall ruled against Marbury in a way that maneuvered Marbury's simple petition for a writ of mandamus into a case that presented a question that went to the heart of American constitutional law itself. In his history of the Supreme Court, the American political historian Robert G. McCloskey wrote: