With Obama's popularity ratings soaring above 70% and the President's ambitious agenda working its way through Congress, the Republican Party, coming off of two consecutive general election defeats, is clearly looking for new faces and new ideas.
Or at least new faces, since most Republicans seem convinced that a tired, bad faith mantra of "small government" will win their way back into the hearts of American voters. So I was pleased to see at least some Republicans in our state legislatures--well known as incubators of new, innovative policy ideas--have decided to try something new--or at least untried for generations: Nullification.
First, a little history. Before the Civil War, a number of states attempted to act on the theory that they had the right to simply ignore any federal law that they deemed to be unconstitutional. Although states attempted to nullify a variety of federal laws, the most famous case of attempted nullification occurred in 1832, when South Carolina expressed their objections to the tariffs of 1828 (the so-called Tariff of Abominations) and 1832 by passing the Ordinance of Nullification in November 1832, declaring the state's refusal to enforce the tariff after February, 1833. President Andrew Jackson responded by getting Congress to authorize the federal use of military force against South Carolina if necessary, and by revising the tariff. In March, 1833, South Carolina blinked and repealed the Ordinance of Nullification. The entire episode is usually seen as a prelude to the Civil War that would come less than thirty years later.
Nullification, then, is not exactly a Constitutional idea with a very positive historical reputation. And to the extent that the reading of the Constitution it embodied was ever plausible, the Civil War would seem to have settled matters against nullification. But why let little things like that get in the way of the bold and innovative Obama Failure Agenda of today's Republican Party!
Legislatures in ten states (including, of course, my own) are already considering "states rights" resolutions that attempt to nullify not only the evil, socialistic stimulus package, but also a variety of other federal laws, including No Child Left Behind.
The ironies and hypocrisies of these efforts abound. After eight years of an administration that claimed absolute powers for the federal executive branch, that long refused to even consider California's request to impose more stringent fuel-efficiency standards, and that wrote the now-apparently-unconstitutional No Child Left Behind, Republicans don't have a lot of credibility suddenly dressing up as Johnny Reb. There's also something inherently funny about every sufficiently red state simultaneously passing the same resolution in the name of its own, putatively local, right to self government.
Luckily for proponents of the "Tenth Amendment Movement," important, serious, and mainstream organizations like the John Birch Society and the League of the South are helping back these efforts.
One wonders if, when the New Nullification inevitably crashes into the wall of political reality, the Republican Party has the patience to wait for three decades before proceeding to the New Civil War.