Nullification – a Right of the People
January 1st, 2012 . by iVoteiVoteAmerica has been following TheTenthAmendment.com for some time and we find ourselves in agreement with the positions taken by them with respect to the tenth amendment which reads,
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The following video produced by our friends at The Tenth Amendment is shared with our readers:
Nullification is discredited–Constitutionally and logically. If the federal government passes a law, all states have to follow the law. That principle was founded early on in with the Malbury vs Madison position, and it was reaffirmed many times.
Ironically, this guy argues that nullification is good for minorities when, at one point, the principles behind nullification were used to try to support slavery.
The author argues that federal governments have abused various people’s rights before, and we need nullification to repeal abusive laws. Question: Couldn’t such laws be repealed at the national level? Additionally, nullification could also be used to repeal good laws. There is nothing inherent in the idea of nullification that automatically makes it good. It could just as easily be used for bad.
The speaker uses mostly examples of governments in foreign countries violating people’s rights throughout history–Germany during the Holocaust and Uganda, for example. Though this video is a proposal for American policy, most of the examples he uses are for foreign countries. That said, let me use another example from a foreign country. In South Africa, there was an “apartheid” policy that many people in the “international community” considered discriminatory. The government eventually passed a law banning such policies. If South Africa were made up of independent states with nullification rights, the states could have nullified the bill, thus promoting discrimination. An example that could have happened here in America if states had the right to nullify is that blacks could have been denied the right to vote (and other rights) in the South, because the Southern states would have nullified many civil rights era laws if they were allowed to. (In fact, the federal government had to be used to integrate some schools when governors like George Wallace stood in the way.)
Thus, this guy is promoting discredited policies that don’t do any good and can be used to do often bad.
Get involved. Talk about cutting taxes and cutting spending. But don’t try to get a pro-nullification law passed. It doesn’t have any value to it as far as improving our lives or advancing positive legislation. Basically, you are just fighting for liberal California’s right to nullify federal tax cuts and nullify other forward-thinking laws.