Rep. Ron Paul Argues States Can Ignore Constitution

[jaxx]

Rep. Ron Paul Argues States Can Ignore Constitution By Nullifying Federal Laws

One of the most powerful lines in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech was his call for racial unity even in Alabama, a state with “its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification.” Indeed, following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, nearly every southern congressman signed the “Southern Manifesto,” which asserted that states were free to ignore federal laws and directives. Now, 48 years later, the unconstitutional idea that states can invalidate federal laws which they don’t like is making a comeback in conservative circles.

<..> Despite Paul’s insistence that nullification is proper and constitutional, Article 6 of the Constitution clearly states that Acts of Congress “shall be the supreme law of the land…anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” That’s why one of our founding fathers, James Madison, argued that nullification would “speedily put an end to the Union itself” by allowing federal laws to be freely ignored by states.

ThinkProgress legal expert Ian Millhiser noted that nullification isn’t just blatantly unconstitutional, it’s “nothing less than a plan to remove the word ‘United’ from the United States of America.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/03/29/ron-...ification/

Ron Paul is a crazy old man, nothing he says is for the good of the country.

[nofurylike]

"Ron Paul is a crazy old man, nothing he says is for the good of the country."
hear, hear!!

thank you for posting this article, jaxx. it is important, and informative.

[Born_A_Truman]

"[N]otwithstanding means in spite of, without regard to or prevention by. The courts, in a number of instances, have accepted that the plain meaning of notwithstanding is in spite of."

Seems Ron Paul and Eric Cantor both need to brush up on the US Constitution.

ETA: Where were they when the Constitution was read in the House at the start of this new Congress? Did either of them pay attention?

[Ikonoklast]

Nullification worked so well the last time it was used by the states.

These people are insane.

[RoyGBiv]

Supremacy clause.

Done.

[Peadar O Suileabhain]

1861-1865.

Doner.

[johnaries]

Didn't we fight a Civil War to settle that question?

[NoPasaran]

(04-03-2011 12:39 PM)johnaries Wrote:  Didn't we fight a Civil War to settle that question?

Indeed we did, but Paul and the states' righters like to pretend that political evolution ceased after the 1790s. The seven states that founded the Confederacy seceded not because of anything the Federal Government did, but out of fear of what it might try to do. Having decided that their ideas would be unable to prevail in civil debate, they resolved to try their luck on the battlefields of civil war.

Elections have consequences, and so do wars. A century and a half ago the adherents of state sovereignty lost their argument. Paul's idiotic notions belong in the same museum of discredited political doctrines as the divine right of kings.

[RoyGBiv]

(04-03-2011 01:56 PM)NoPasaran Wrote:  Elections have consequences, and so do wars. A century and a half ago the adherents of state sovereignty lost their argument.

If you really want to make a neo-Confederate have a conniption, suggest to them that the war was indeed fought over states' rights, and the adherents of states' rights won. One of the complaints among the states that seceded was the lack of enforcement of the fugitive slave law within the northern states. Several slaves states were demanding the federal government assert its authority against state authority (invoking the supremacy clause) to return slaves to their owners. This is mentioned directly in several secession documents.

Of course that's not why the war was fought at all, nor was "states rights" in general anything but the smallest part of the equation in either the rebellious states or those that remained loyal. The war began over a dispute as to the legality of unilateral secession, which could be construed as a "state right," but wasn't strictly presented as such.

I would disagree that the war determined anything. The judicial decision in Texas v. White established firmly that states did not have a legal right of unilateral secession according to the constitution. Texas v. White occurred after the war and in consequence of it, but the legal concept didn't require a war to determine.

The point being: The states rights argument is post-war apologia.