If beauty is in the eye of the
beholder, so is nullification — the idea that states can limit the enforcement
of federal laws within their borders.
Supporters of nullification see it
as a necessary and effective tool to protect states and citizens from the
ever-growing power of the federal government. Detractors think this debate was
settled by the Civil War, painting proponents of the idea as
“neo-Confederates.” In fact, nullification is a growing movement with support
on both sides of the political aisle.As author and historian Thomas Woods notes, nullification is as old as the republic. Its first advocates were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who drafted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which declared, “whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” Jefferson and Madison acted out of dismay over the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Congress adopted to make it a misdemeanor to speak out against the government, bringing Congress and the president into “contempt or disrepute.”
Early in our history, nullification
was also prominently used by free states to ignore the federal fugitive slave
laws that forced free states to return runaway slaves back to slave states. The
Civil War tainted and shelved the idea of nullification, but the states are
bringing back the concept in response to the continued expansion of the federal
government. They’ve wiped the dust from the 10th Amendment with state laws
seeking to nullify federal statutes.
Over a dozen states, with South
Carolina being the most recent, have passed legislation aimed at preventing the
Obamacare health care mandate from being enforced in their jurisdictions. South
Carolina’s goes the furthest by proposing to grant taxpayers a state tax
deduction equal to the federal penalty for failing to purchase health care.
Montana, Kansas and Alabama have joined the gun-control fight by enacting laws
preventing federal gun-control enforcement within their borders. South Carolina
enacted a law allowing its residents to produce the incandescent light bulbs
banned by Congress.
Even liberals are joining the trend.
In California, the state Senate has joined dozens of other states in approving
legislation designed to prevent the president from executing the indefinite
detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act. Colorado and
Washington state have effectively nullified the federal government’s
prohibition on marijuana. When Congress mandated creation of a national ID card
in the 2005 REAL ID Act, red and blue states joined together to reject the
federal mandate.
The White House response has been
“it depends.” The Justice Department tiptoes around Colorado’s pot legalization
while threatening lawsuits over nullification of federal gun laws in Kansas.
Federal courts aren’t likely to be
so accommodating. Judges have sat back since the New Deal and allowed the
federal government to do anything it wants in the name of “interstate
commerce,” even in matters that have nothing to do with buying and selling
between states. It’s a legal fight worth having, as something needs to be done
to check the intrusion of the federal bureaucracy into our lives.
Source: The Washington Times
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