Our Cascading Nullification Crisis

America is battling the ideological heirs of petulant treasonous slavers

Photo by Max Saeling on Unsplash. Fatnecked feral hogs of nullification are running roughshod over our rights.

America is in the middle of 21st century nullification crisis — an attempt by various political actors, from state governors to candidates for the local school board to “sovereign citizens” to community college administrators, to deny and subvert the proper legal authority of various levels of government. What is going on today is the latest iteration of what happened in 1832, but we may be in more danger now of losing our constitutional democratic republic than we were at that early date.

What happened in 1832? The political leadership of South Carolina was irked that Congress had passed a tariff bill imposing import taxes on certain goods. There was nothing irregular or unconstitutional about the bill — it was duly debated, voted on, passed, and became law. The Constitutional authority of the federal government to impose tariffs and import taxes was long established. There was nothing amiss about the bill except that the rich slavers of South Carolina, who depended on cheap imported fabrics to barely clothe their captive laborers, didn’t like it.

So South Carolina, egged on by Andrew Jackson’s own vice-president, John C. Calhoun, asserted that it had the right to unilaterally declare a federal law null and void…