Does the Constitution Contain Article VI or Not? Views Differ.
By This NYT article on various “states’ rights (sic)” movements is rather…credulous. For example:
“Everything we’ve tried to keep the federal government confined to rational limits has been a failure, an utter, unrelenting failure — so why not try something else?” said Thomas E. Woods Jr., a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a nonprofit group in Auburn, Ala., that researches what it calls “the scholarship of liberty.”
Mr. Woods, who has a Ph.D. in history, and has written widely on states’ rights and nullification — the argument that says states can sometimes trump or disregard federal law — said he was not sure where the dots between states’ rights and politics connected. But he and others say that whatever it is, something politically powerful is brewing under the statehouse domes.
It might be helpful for readers, in evaluating Woods’s seemingly dispassionate claim about the mysterious political valence of nullification, to know that he’s in fact a hack propagandist who expresses considerable sympathy for the primary causes nullification was used to justify: treason in defense of slavery and lawlessness in defense of apartheid.
This is also an odd assertion to accept at face value:
And at the Tenth Amendment Center, the group’s founder, Michael Boldin, said he thought states that had bucked federal authority over the last decade by legalizing medical marijuana, even as federal law held all marijuana use and possession to be illegal, had set the template in some ways for the effort now. And those states, Mr. Boldin said, were essentially validated in their efforts last fall when the Justice Department said it would no longer make medical marijuana a priority in the states were it was legal. Nullification, he said, was shown to work.
But, really, this shows no such thing. The Obama administration, after all, didn’t deny that it had the power to enforce federal law notwithstanding state nullification; rather, they elected to enforce the law consistent with their substantive priorities. This kind of nullification will stop working when the next Republican administration is elected.