"Three parts inanity and one part prospective treason"

The neo-secessionist resolution that passed 43-1 indeed tells us a lot about the current Southern politics that currently dominate the Republican Party, none of it good (although some of it pretty funny):

Really, you can’t make this stuff up. You have to read it in full to believe it. Even then you can’t believe it. You thought that “nullification” had been rendered inoperative by the Civil War? Well, think again. You considered secession a pre-Appomattox kind of thing? Well, reconsider. You assumed that John C. Calhoun was a dead parrot? Well, turns out he was only resting.

The resolution is written in a mock eighteenth-century style, ornate and pompous. Just two of its twenty sentences account for more than 1,200 of its 2,200 words. But the substance is even nuttier than the style.

It begins by saying that what it sneeringly calls “a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States” limits the “General Government” only to specifically named powers, such as punishing piracy and counterfeiting, and that “each party” to the “compact,” i.e., each state, is the final judge of whether the “General Government” has overstepped its very tight bounds. Among other rights, the states “retain to themselves the right of judging how far the licentiousness of speech and of the press may be abridged without lessening their useful freedom.” (There’s a lovely phrase: “the licentiousness of speech and of the press.”) If I’m reading the resolution’s convoluted language correctly, it also asserts that the states have a right to suppress “libels, falsehood, and defamation, equally with heresy and false religion” without interference from “federal tribunals.”

There’s more. If a state doesn’t like some federal law, then “nullification of the act is the rightful remedy.”

It looks like the Texas Republican Party platform is no longer the gold standard for wingnuttery…

…Hilzoy notes that the bulk of the Georgia resolution isn’t mock 18th-century prose but is 18th century prose, from Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolution in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts. Evidently, the provenance doesn’t make the Georgia position any more constitutionally respectable…