Thus you see ... the Whig party and the Democratic party both stood on the same platform. That platform was the right of the people of each State and of each Territory to decide their local domestic institutions for themselves, subject only to the Federal Constitution.
Very adept defense of states' rights, right? Only it wasn't Ron Paul on lunch counters and FEMA or poor Mitt on that Massachusetts health care law tied like tin cans to his tail. It was from one of the founders of their creed, the Little Giant, Stephen A Douglas, spoken during his debate series against Lincoln, in 1858, and the question was slavery. And Mr Douglas repeated this stand over and over during that long hot summer in Illinois.
Whenever a storm seems inexorable, then you try and oppose an ineluctable barrier to it, like a sea wall against the storm. When there occurs a vast general uprising, the best guide and fondest hope is to break the tide into small eddies; a general outcry in favor of civil wrongs, for instance, might be deferred to the democratic process of the lynch mob.
States' Rights is the term of choice to shrug off a general responsibility into a merely local disgrace. Does the right of the plantation baron to his spoils entail a degradation of the nation's character? Let's allow Kansas and Nebraska to decide. Is it moral that we join every other developed nation in providing health care to every citizen? Let Louisiana determine.
Currently, the argument depends like flotsam on the rising tide of ignorance and stupidity, and the jury is out until a year from November.