Of course you should not consider nullification, since CNN won’t like that. The post then proceeds as if I hadn’t answered Heritage’s arguments on this already — here and here — or as if people couldn’t simply get to my fairly comprehensive “Nullification: Answering the Objections” via Google.

If there’s a law you consider unconstitutional and outrageous, why, you should “encourage the repeal of the law or wait and see what mood Justice Anthony Kennedy will be in next June when the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of Obamacare.” Well, that sounds like a super strategy. I’m sure it’ll be just as successful as everything else conservatives have tried over the past century to limit the federal government.

It’s also exactly the opposite of what Thomas Jefferson said to do in such a situation, which may be why Jefferson is The Man Who Wasn’t There at Heritage.org.

Then we get the little lecture on “isolationism,” the left-wing smear term intended to shut down all discussion of the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus — to which the supposedly brave, conventional-wisdom-bucking Heritage Foundation avidly subscribes.

Very interesting that a think-tank as prominent as Heritage, which promotes only the most exquisitely conventional, establishment-friendly thoughts, feels the need to go after these issues in particular. Are people straying from the neocon plantation? Are things spinning out of Heritage’s control? Let’s hope so.

re-posted from TomWoods.com

Here’s Murray Rothbard making the case for van Buren about a decade earlier, with the important caveat that he was unlibertarian on the Indian question.

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According to prosecutors, Heicklen’s “advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without Constitutional protections no matter where it occurred…. His speech is not protected by the First Amendment…. No legal system could long survive if it gave every individual the option of disregarding with impunity any law which by his personal standard was judged morally untenable.”

Meanwhile, a representative of the New York Civil Liberties Union has shot back: “The government is dangerously wrong in claiming it can criminalize sidewalk advocacy supporting jury nullification. Other than the extremely limited situations in which someone seeks to influence a known juror in a case, jury nullification advocacy is squarely protected by the First Amendment.”

Prosecutor Rebecca Mermelstein even favors denying Heicklen the jury trial he has requested.

Meanwhile, the terrible and unthinkable legal doctrine of jury nullification — so very dangerous to a free society, say federal prosecutors — was in fact the doctrine held by the Founding Fathers themselves. (I am hereby giving away the answer to one of the 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask.)

(Thanks to George Viaud.)

If you read this blog regularly, nothing here will come as a surprise to you. But I am still trying to understand what principles the Tea Party espouses. Constitutionalism? Newt Gingrich is a constitutionalist? Herman Cain is a constitutionalist? What is the evidence for these claims? Both figures hold extremely conventional views on a wide array of issues. Neither one is any kind of maverick, except according to the media’s definition of the term.

Here’s what I wrote in Rollback about Newt the constitutionalist:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has a reputation for being a right-wing ideologue. But it is surely a strange right-wing ideologue who credits Franklin Roosevelt with lifting the country out of the Great Depression, joins with John Kerry on “climate change,” and supports (among many other things) the Medicare prescription drug benefit, federal programs to pay for more teachers, Internet access for every American, and rewards to students who take challenging math and science courses — not to mention his sympathy for federal energy policy and Hillary Clinton’s proposed national health-care database, among other things….

[In 1994,] the GOP leadership made the [election] into a referendum on [Gingrich's] “Contract with America,” a series of proposals the party pledged to champion if elected. Democrats and Republicans alike pretended it was a radical assault on government spending and activity — Democrats in order to frighten their base, and Republicans in order to energize theirs. The Contract was, in fact, a hodgepodge of trivial changes that both kept the basic structure of the American Leviathan intact and neutralized the more ambitious plans and proposals of freshman congressmen who may actually have wanted to change something. The center-left Brookings Institution had it right: “Viewed historically, the Contract represents the final consolidation of the bedrock domestic policies and programs of the New Deal, the Great Society, the post-Second World War defense establishment, and, most importantly, the deeply rooted national political culture that has grown up around them.”

Here’s more about Newt. Newt the constitutionalist, who will save the republic. That’s about what the American public deserves.

So what is the attraction of these men? They supported TARP, opposition to which is supposed to define the Tea Party. Thus on the key economic issue of our time, they sided with the establishment against the people. Nice.

I see no serious proposals for specific spending cuts from either of them, and opposition to high spending is supposed to define the Tea Party. Cain endorsed Mitt Romney in 2008, the person the Tea Partiers claim to dislike.

Cain’s positions are a complete disaster, as I’ve shown again and again (see below), and the fact that he thought the economy was fine on September 1, 2008 shouldn’t fill Tea Partiers or anyone else for that matter with confidence that this is the man we need at a world-historic moment of economic crisis.

I wrote a post not long ago called ‘I Support Cain’ Means ‘The Country’s Fine Just as It Is.”And here’s my resource page on Cain, the alleged “outsider” who chaired the Federal Reserve of Kansas City.

Let me amend that blog post title, by the way. “I support Cain” or “I support Gingrich” means “I haven’t yet been exploited enough by the American political duopoly, so please keep looting me and holding me in contempt. Though while you’re doing it, have the decency to give pretty speeches about how much you side with me against big government.”

Dr. Paul’s actual approach is to strip the federal courts of authority over a host of issues involving family, thereby getting the federal government out of these areas. This is the correct position constitutionally, morally, and strategically.

What could Vander Plaats’ argument against world government be? What if France is not sufficiently family friendly? Why not send in the UN? Anyone who opposes world government must be an immoral idiot who believes in “country rights” instead of the triumph of righteousness.

If Vander Plaats does not support world government, why not? Why not have a powerful world government that can use violence rather than persuasion and example to put right all the world’s wrongs? If states’ rights is the wrong position, so is countries’ rights, so can we expect Bob to follow his logic wherever it takes him, all the way to global government?

As with the other planks of the life-was-better-before-the-free-market school, this is fantasy. Sheilagh Ogilvie of Cambridge makes this abundantly clear in her new book Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000-1800(Cambridge University Press). The guilds, Ogilvie finds, were simply “an effective way for the rich and powerful to increase their wealth, at the expense of outsiders, customers and society as a whole.” Far from promoting “social justice,” whatever that means, they “they were monopolies, rent-seeking institutions that continued to exist as long as they served to distribute a disproportionate share of economic goods to their members and their rulers.” As one reviewer puts it, “This book will make it impossible for anyone ever to argue again that merchant guilds were beneficial to society just because they produced benefits for their own members.”

It is not the case that capitalism “encourages greed,” though we hear this constantly from socialists and “traditionalists.” Capitalism is merely a series of exchanges, bounded by property and contract. “Greed” will be evident in any system — full-fledged socialism, medieval guildism, crony capitalism, whatever. The difference is that in those systems, people improve their position by harming others, and only by harming others. Under the market, where the consumer is king, one advances by pleasing his fellow man.

From the book:

Cui bono? Who benefits from the perpetuation of the Washington rules [what I am calling the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus]? The answer to that question helps explain why the national security consensus persists.

The answer, needless to say, is that Washington benefits. The Washington rules deliver profit, power, and privilege to a long list of beneficiaries: elected and appointed officials, corporate executives and corporate lobbyists, admirals and generals, functionaries staffing the national security apparatus, media personalities, and policy intellectuals from universities and research organizations. Each year the Pentagon expends hundreds of billions of dollars to raise and support U.S. military forces. This money lubricates American politics, filling campaign coffers and providing a source of largesse — jobs and contracts — for distribution to constituents. It provides lucrative “second careers” for retired U.S. military officers hired by weapons manufacturers or by consulting firms appropriately known as “Beltway Bandits.” It funds the activities of think tanks that relentlessly advocate for policies guaranteed to fend off challenges to established conventions. “Military-industrial complex” no longer suffices to describe the congeries of interests profiting from and committed to preserving the national security status quo.

Read the whole thing.

I’ll try to write more on this when I have time (for now, I’ll note that I cover the subject inRollback, my book from earlier this year). When we recall that stand-alone institutions, both commercial and investment, also failed during the crisis, and that all of them acquired mortgage-backed securities (which they had always been allowed to do, by the way), the Glass-Steagall “repeal” looks more and more like a red herring that appeals to people whose belief system requires them to find some way a Fed-fueled bubble could have been stopped had the right regulatory structure been in place.

(The problem with those who point to Glass-Steagall is not that they’re radical. It’s that they’re not nearly radical enough. They think the system as is, shot through with moral hazard at every level, and presided over by a market-defying central bank, is of its nature stable and without fault; we just need a few regulations.)

Because Glass-Steagall was passed during the Depression, it is assumed that it was addressing a pressing need of the time.  In fact, the lack of government-enforced division between commercial and investment banking had precisely zero to do with bank problems during the Great Depression. The 9,000 bank failures during the early 1930s had far more to do with the damage done by government regulation — namely, the unit-banking laws that made it difficult for banks to diversify their portfolios (by limiting them to a single office and making branching illegal) — than with a lack of regulation. These were small banks, not the behemoths for which Glass-Steagall would have been relevant. Canada had none of these stifling regulations, and had zero bank failures. (Incidentally, Canada also avoided all the post-Civil War bank panics that struck the U.S., even though Canada did not have a central bank until 1934 — yet again, reality refuses to conform to the where-would-we-be-without-our-wise-overlords comic-book version of events.)

The Glass-Steagall-did-it crowd is the same crowd that likes to claim Canada avoided the worst of the U.S. crisis because it was so much better regulated. But they can’t have it both ways — Canada did not have a Glass-Steagall law! (For the real story on what happened in Canada, click here.)

For a little more on this, see Bill Woolsey. Again, I’ll try to revisit this soon.