Kansas Star columnist Mary Sanchez wants the federal government to arrest suffering cancer patients using marijuana for pain relief and lock them up in cages.
Granted, she’s not likely to admit it, but I think I stand on pretty solid ground making that assumption because she hates nullification. She said so in a recent column about a Kansas law that attempts to block unconstitutional federal gun laws.
“Here is the company legislators have placed Kansans with: slaveholders and segregationists,” she wrote.
In other words, in the company of racists.
I presume Sanchez isn’t a racist, so she must also oppose state laws that ignore federal marijuana prohibition. I’m sure she would not want to find herself in the company of “slaveholders and segregationists” asserting state sovereignty and passing their own laws on weed. Federal laws must reign supreme! And they must be enforced!
“It’s the old state’s sovereignty idea. The same argument the antebellum South tried to keep their slaves. It arose again when states fought the desegregation of public schools,” she wrote of Kansas efforts to nullify unconstitutional federal gun laws.
Translation: state sovereignty is racist.
So, regardless of what state legislatures have to say about it, weed-smoking cancer patients must be punished. States can’t just run around creating their own drug policy and circumventing common sense federal drug law.
Then again, maybe Sanchez is a racist. After all, she must believe that northern states should not have taken steps to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. They should have stepped aside and allowed slave-catchers to drag escaped slaves, and even free blacks accused of escaping slavery, back south into bondage. That doesn’t seem like a very compassionate position to take regarding black people. But you can’t have states blocking enforcement of common sense slave-catching laws.
You might find yourself a little confused at this point. How can segregationists and slavers (racists) exclusively claim the principles of state sovereignty and nullification when northern abolitionists appealed to the same principles to resist slavery? I was confused as well. When I read Sanchez’s column, I assumed she was suffering from the same historical knowledge deficit as most Americans. I sent her an email hoping to add a little knowledge to her database.
Did you know that nullification was never used in support of slavery? Did you know that it was actually northern abolitionists who invoked the principles of nullification to resist fugitive slave rendition?
So, you could just as accurately write, “It’s the old state’s sovereignty idea. The same argument northern abolitionists used justify protecting fugitive slaves and even legitimately free blacks from being kidnapped and drug back into bondage.”
It seems you probably missed that little tidbit in history class. Kinda puts a different spin on your argument, doesn’t it?
Much to my surprise, I found out that she apparently does know the history, or she at least implied that she does in her response.
Thanks for taking the time to write. Nullification and it’s often-confused counterpart interposition, have both been asserted in various ways throughout America’s wide expanse of history.
If you want to quote history in a rebuttal; admit the full story.
It’s apparently imperative to “admit the full story” when using history to rebut historical nonsense, but not necessary to “admit the full story” when using history to make a political point. Indeed, Ms. Sanchez actually left an important part of nullification history out in her little tome on guns, because that would have destroyed her “slavery, segregationist, racism” narrative. On top of that, she got some crucial facts 180 wrong. (And actually, I have “admitted the full story.” You can read it HERE.)
I replied and recommended that she should take her own advice.
She wrote me back again and tacitly admitted that she didn’t “tell the whole story” in her article, even though she knows there is more.
Isn’t that what I just did??
“Nullification and it’s often-confused counterpart interposition, have both been asserted in various ways throughout America’s wide expanse of history”….I never claimed citing one use in a column covered the gamut of history….Thanks for writing.
No Ms. Sanchez, you didn’t. But you certainly did cherry-pick history, and flat-out make some up, so that you could blow your dog whistle and lead your readers to believe that every nullification supporter harbors racist views.
So which is it? Are you supporter of nullifying federal drug laws and federal fugitive slave rendition laws, thus joining hands in principle with the racist gun law nullifiers? Or do you always oppose nullification, meaning you must condemn state efforts to block federal fugitive slave rendition and advocate feds jailing cancer patients?
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