Nullification

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Abbeville Institute

Nullification

By Christopher McDonald on Aug 22, 2017

A review of Nullification: Reclaiming the Consent of the Governed by Clyde Wilson, Shotwell Press, 2016.

As a young conservative, I came across ideas like nullification and states’ rights, during my studies. But they were always passed over, as if they didn’t mean anything anymore. When I read Robert Bork’s excellent book on Originalism, I never saw his unquestioned and unstated premise: that the it is the job of federal judges to decide upon the Constitution. I was never quite so aware of how much we have forgotten about America’s constitutional tradition, as I was when reading Dr. Clyde Wilson’s latest work.

Dr. Wilson’s work Nullification is 10 chapters in length. Most are brief, filled with prose that hits you like a lightweight boxer. No sooner is the reader struck once by a line than another one. Time after time, he takes cherished notions and leaves them in ruins. He fills pages with historical retelling and terse applications of the truth to the present.

Nullification is a brief and useful corrective to some beliefs of mainstream conservatism. Conservatives have largely accepted the supremacy of the Federal judiciary and its two claims.  

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Thursday, August 31, 2017

10 Objections to Nullification–Refuted

Nullification, also known as State interposition, is controversial because it challenges the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation. The argument behind nullification is that the States—as parties to the compact that created the federal government—have a right to interpret the Constitution and veto acts where the federal government exceeds its delegated power. Genuine nullification involves a State’s declaration of unconstitutionality and obstruction of that federal law within its territory.

The majority of historians and legal scholars today dismiss nullification, but they rarely engage the arguments in support of the practice. Here are 10 of their most common objections to nullification, followed by a refutation.

(1) Nullification does not work.   

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Posted by Brock Townsend at Thursday, August 31, 2017 

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Genuine Nullification: Marijuana and the Carolina Doctrine

08/31/2017 Zachary Garris

The movement to legalize marijuana at the state level is often described as “nullification.” Strictly speaking, however, this is not nullification. Genuine nullification is where a state declares a federal act (law, ruling, etc.) to be unconstitutional and then obstructs that act’s enforcement within the state.1 This state veto of a federal act has its roots in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 and was put into practice by South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33.

What is happening today with marijuana is that a state refuses to enforce a federal law within its territory. This is better termed “neo-nullification,” as the practice lacks the declaration of unconstitutionality and the obstruction of federal enforcement of the law.

Neo-nullification has been enabled by the Supreme Court’s anti-commandeering rulings in New York v. United States (1992) and Printz v. United States (1997), where the Court held that the federal government cannot commandeer state officials (New York) or state legislatures (Printz) to enforce federal law. This leaves a loophole for states to ignore federal law with the hopes that the federal government will not enforce its laws within the states.    https://mises.org/blog/genuine-nullification-marijuana-and-carolina-doctrine