Charlie Pierce lays some relevant history on us:
Nullification was a bad idea at the time, and John C. Calhoun should have been locked up on a prison hulk forever for even mentioning it. It looks even worse in retrospect. And like all things evil, vile, and fundamentally racist, it’s back with a vengeance.
From WMUR:
The chair of the state House Election Law Committee – state Rep. Barbara Griffin, R-Goffstown — is sponsoring an amendment asserting that if the federal bill becomes law, the state will maintain the “full force and effect” of its authority over elections for state offices, such as governor, the Legislature and the Executive Council. If both measures become law, a situation could arise in which New Hampshire would have one set of federal rules for elections for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House seats and another for state and county offices. Presidential elections are also conducted on a state-by-state basis.
Under the amendment, the state would keep its authority over “procedures and requirements relating to voter eligibility, voter registration, absentee voting, conducting the vote and counting of votes” in state elections.
The wormwood in democracy is right there in the first sentence. This amendment proposes to put in place a law that would obviate a federal statute in New Hampshire. This used to be called “interposition.” Martin Luther King, Jr. name-checked it in his speech at the March on Washington. Its basis is in the theory of nullification, and not only was it used to create the legal infrastructure for Jim Crow, but also it was the philosophical basis for the Massive Resistance campaign against integration.
Wouldn’t it be easier just to tailor your policies to people’s needs and to reach out to groups of voters whom you’ve otherwise ignored? Instead, political hacks at the state level are doing their level best to make sure that any progressive measure or hint of reform stops at the state border by concocting ludicrous “constitutional” arguments against them, and establishing laws that passed their sell-by date in 1859.
Nullification had its roots in the push-pull politics embedded in the country’s constitutional structure right from jump. The grappling between the powers of the states and the powers of the federal government is the reason we have a Constitution in the first place. As an independent doctrine in what became the United States of America, it had its roots in the fight waged by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison against the policies of the administration of John Adams, specifically against the Alien and Sedition Acts. Nullification was the central argument of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions in 1789 and 1790.
(Madison, ever the pragmatist and constitutional mechanic, saw where nullification ultimately had to lead and, once Adams was sent back to Massachusetts, spent the rest of his life trying to scrub his fingerprints off the resolution. He lived long enough to help President Andrew Jackson fight nullification in the 1830s.)
John C. Calhoun was a defining contributor to nullification as an American philosophy.
As a critical issue in our national politics, it emerged in the tariff battles during the Jackson administration, but that was merely the most convenient flashpoint. Nullification was about what kind of nation this was going to be and, like so many other things in the country’s history, that included the future of chattel slavery. The founding document was the product of the roiling, steaming intellect of then-Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. In December of 1828, he published his “Exposition and Protest,” all 35,000 words of it. Ostensibly, it was an attack on the so-called Tariff of Abominations. In reality, it was an assault on the constitutional structure of the government.
If it be conceded, as it must be by every one who is the least conversant with our institutions, that the sovereign powers delegated are divided between the General and State Governments, and that the latter hold their portion by the same tenure as the former, it would seem impossible to deny to the States the right of deciding on the infractions of their powers, and the proper remedy to be applied for their correction. The right of judging, in such cases, is an essential attribute of sovereignty, of which the States cannot be divested without losing their sovereignty itself, and being reduced to a subordinate corporate condition. In fact, to divide power, and to give to one of the parties the exclusive right of judging of the portion allotted to each, is, in reality, not to divide it at all; and to reserve such exclusive right to the General Government (it matters not by what department) to be exercised, is to convert it, in fact, into a great consolidated government, with unlimited powers, and to divest the States, in reality, of all their rights, it is impossible to understand the force of terms, and to deny so plain a conclusion.
By 1832, Calhoun was Jackson’s vice president. (Their pairing remains the greatest argument for party-ticket elections in our history.) The South Carolina Legislature declared that the tariff of 1828 was null and void in that state. With fire-eaters in his state already whispering about secession, Calhoun pitched nullification as a middle ground between them and Jackson’s assertion of national authority, which very few people believed. In 1830, senators Robert Hayne of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts fought out the issue in one of the most famous Senate debates in history.
An 1832 cartoon depicts a nullification crisis created by South Carolina.
But there was far more going on than an argument over trade policy. There were all the issues raised by a rapidly expanding country. There also was, inevitably, slavery. As historian Harry Watson writes, the Webster-Hayne debate was touched off by a proposal by another senator that would’ve slowed the roll on sales of newly acquired lands in the West, guaranteeing that the government’s reliance on tariff revenues would continue. During the course of that debate, Webster set the feline screeching from the burlap.
…[Webster] scoffed at South Carolina’s constitutional theories and referred to the blighting effects of the slave economy, suggesting that the free labor system would always make allies of the North and West. Webster’s suggestion that Southern problems could be blamed on slavery touched a raw nerve…Hayne lashed back at Webster with a fiery defense of the peculiar institution. Hayne insisted slavery was a blessing, not a curse, that blacks were wholly unqualified for liberty and far better off in slavery than in the “savagery” of Africa or the penury of freedom…The debate had wandered far afield from public lands or even from the tariff, but Hayne’s reply gave Daniel Webster the perfect opportunity to present an alternative vision of the American Republic.
Thus did a trade dispute become an existential debate over the political nature of the country, one that went on even beyond Appomattox, and one that will go on beyond our own moment. It wasn’t about tariffs then, and it’s not about environmental regulations now.
Which brings us to Louisiana, which wants to make itself safe for poisoning people. From The Guardian:
But McCormick, a Republican, introduced a bill at the Louisiana capitol last week that would protect oil companies and not residents in his district who have to breathe in that air. The bill would establish Louisiana as a “fossil fuel sanctuary state” and ban local and state employees from enforcing federal laws and regulations that negatively impact petrochemical companies. The idea for the bill, McCormick said, came about after President Joe Biden began putting new restrictions on oil and gas companies, including a pause on new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters. “Look at what they did to the coal industry,” he said at a Louisiana house committee hearing. “We already know what the game plan is. They already picked off coal. Now they’re going after oil and gas.”
(The “sanctuary cities/states” trope is popular among the modern nullifiers. It has been used to pre-emptively resist proposed—and, occasionally, utterly imaginary—federal gun-control statutes, and to declare one locale or another anti-choice. The people using it believe themselves to be clever in a hackneyed Own The Libs way.)
The coal industry is dying because a) people want to breathe, b) people don’t want to have to buy seafront property in Indiana, and c) we don’t ride in coal-driven anything any more. And it is well within established law that the federal government can craft environmental regulations that states have to follow.
McCormick’s bill was tabled because of concerns that the current language could cause the US Environmental Protection Agency to revoke the state’s authority to enforce federal rules. But his colleagues still offered their support. The chairman of the Louisiana House Natural Resources and the Environment Committee, Jean-Paul P Coussan (R-Lafayette), said he would work with McCormick to resolve issues with the bill that could give the federal government more power over oil and gas companies in Louisiana.
The environmental abuse of poor Louisianans is a national disgrace. But to enshrine it with some high-falutin’ legislative language is an insult to the 21st century. This is no more about oil than Webster-Hayne was about cotton. Nullification was itself never nullified by history. Its death is continual and, too often, sealed in blood.
And so it goes …