The Principles of ’98 or the Partisanship of ’10?
Written by:
Derek J. Sheriff
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Jeff Taylor warns principled Americans who are part of the Tea Party and Tenth Amendment movements against allowing their efforts to become co-opted by those who have purely partisan ambitions. We must remember never to put party before principles, especially the Principles of ’98.
The Principles of ’98 or the Partisanship of ’10?
by Jeff Taylor
My article on nullification, entitled “States’ Fights,” appears in the July 2010 issue of The American Conservative. It gives an overview of specific efforts – historical and contemporary. It points out that the Tenth Amendment has been a bulwark not only for slavery and segregation, but also for abolition and freedom. Opponents of nullification use John C. Calhoun as a bogeyman when Thomas Jefferson was an earlier and more typical exemplar of the movement. It was Jefferson who penned and promoted the Kentucky Resolution of 1798. Below I place the current state sovereignty movement into its political context.
Nullification is the repudiation or ignoring of a federal law by a state government. It is also known as interposition. This deliberate failure to enforce federal statutes or judicial rulings within states is normally based on constitutional grounds.
In recent decades, the first organized effort to nullify federal laws came from the Left and the libertarian Right in the form of medical marijuana. What began in California, in 1996, as a challenge to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, has spread with more states attempting to legalize cannabis, for both medicinal and recreational use. We have also seen states’ rights evoked to protect Second Amendment firearms freedom and to block the Real ID Act of 2005.
During the past half year, state efforts to block or opt out of the federal health care reform are different from other endeavors partly because of the project’s lopsidedly partisan nature. It’s a Republican cause. It is linked not only to principled, nonpartisan constitutionalism, but also to large doses of hatred and hysteria in regard to Barack Obama.
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Jeff Taylor [send him mail] is a political scientist. His book Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy was published by University of Missouri Press. Visit his website.
Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
Derek J. Sheriff is the coordinator for the Arizona chapter of the Tenth Amendment Center.. He's also the host for the Arizona Tenth Amendment Center Podcast, which can be found at the iTunes StoreHERE
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EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed in the above post are those of the individual author only. The article is presented here to foster discussion, and does not necessarily represent the views or positions of the national Tenth Amendment Center.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 12:42 pm. It is filed under Arizona and tagged with Constitution, federalism, Nullification, Principles of '98, state sovereignty, states rights, tenth amendment.
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