Alaska House Speaker Calls for Nullification

And a local reporter condemns him with the same old fourth-grade arguments. He gives us the Supremacy Clause (which he evidently thinks Thomas Jefferson didn’t know about), which he takes to mean that any old federal law trumps all state law, an interpretation that would have come as a surprise to the ratifiers. He gives us the morally grotesque “the Civil War settled this” argument, naturally. And so on.

Then we get the usual lecture about the bad old Articles of Confederation, regarding which Aronno is content to repeat his fourth-grade lesson, and has evidently never shown any curiosity beyond that. He quotes Madison without acknowledging the Report of 1800, where Madison said the states had to have a defense mechanism to guard against all three branches of the federal government.

Aronno seems to consider himself quite learned in American history, and can hardly conceal his impatience with people who disagree with him (they need to be “educated,” Aronno says, without a hint of irony). This is kind of funny, because his own knowledge of nullification could fit inside a thimble, and most of what he thinks he knows is erroneous.

All of these arguments — the Madison objection, the Supremacy Clause, “the Civil War settled this,” the civil rights movement and desegregation — and much more are decisively answered at my Nullification FAQ. I’ll wait for Aronno’s detailed reply.

I might add that I did write a book on Nullification.