The spirit ofJohn C. Calhoun andRichard Russell is abroad in the land again in aletter to the Picayune:
If “we the people” allow the federal government to
destroy our right to decide an issue as important as our
personal health care, then we are no longer free people but
have become serfs of our political masters in Washington.We must act now to overcome the tyranny of the political
status quo and return political authority to the people of
the once-sovereign states.Citizens of Louisiana should contact their state
legislators and insist that they pass a joint resolution
nullifying the recently enacted health-care reform.The carnival of arrogance, power and abject indifference
to the Constitution that recently occurred in Congress
demonstrates beyond question that we now live in the era of
federal supremacy — where the political elite rule, and
“we the people” must submit.This is not the America our founding fathers crafted.
Nullification within our respective sovereign states will
destroy the tyranny of federal supremacy and return America
to a government of limited federalism where “we the
people” are the final arbiters of federal authority
under the Constitution.James Ronald Kennedy, Mandeville
I love it when amateur historians “interpret” our national saga: they tend to leave out certain pesky details. The Civil War, or War Between The States as Mr. Kennedy surely calls it, settled the issue of nullification. But the teabaggers and their fundamentalist fellow travelers have their own reality as well as their own version of history. It’s amusing to hear the “founding fathers” described as essentially right wing Republicans when they were bunch of deists, skeptics and free thinkers. The *real* founding father of the United States (emphasis on the United) was Abraham Lincoln who bound the country/empire together by force of arms. Of course, he also freed the slaves, which Confederate nostalgics like Mr. Kennedy may consider an abuse of power too.
The current attempts by wingnuts to keep the sky from falling by suing to stop HCR are likely to fail unless they try a different approach than “nullification and interposition by the sovereign states.” Segregationists attempted to revive these doctrines in the Fifties and Sixties and these efforts went nowhere in the courts. So, wingers, fuhgeddaboutit.
We will, however, be hearing a lot about theCommerce Clause, which gives Congress the authority to regulate interstate commerce. The courts have given the Feds a lot of power via the Commerce Clause over the past 73 years but let’s keep our fingers crossed that none of these cases gets to the Roberts Court. There are at least 3 Justices who are itching toroll the clock back to 1936. I doubt that they would prevail but why give Scalito a crack at it.
UPDATE: Zachary Roth has a fine piece of reporting about HCR legal issues at TPM.