Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century
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37. Gutzman, Virginia’s American Revolution, 118.
38. Ibid., 120.
39. The classic exposition of this view is Adrienne Koch and Harry Ammon, “The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions: An Episode in Jefferson’s and Madison’s Defense of Civil Liberties,” William and Mary Quarterly 5 (April 1948): 145–76.
40. Gutzman, Virginia’s American Revolution, 130.
41. Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. X, 349n1.
CHAPTER 5
1. Ralph Raico, “The Theory of Economic Development and the ‘European Miracle’: The Vindication of P.T. Bauer,” manuscript in possession of the author; a shorter version appeared in The Collapse of Development Planning, ed. Peter J. Boettke (New York: New York University Press, 1993).
2. Jean Baechler, The Origins of Capitalism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1976), ch. 7. See also Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “Cobden on Freedom, Peace, and Trade,” Human Rights Review 5 (October-December 2003): 77–90.
3. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 98.
4. For the discussion of federative polities and modern states I am deeply indebted to Donald W. Livingston, “The Founding and the Enlightenment: Two Theories of Sovereignty,” in Vital Remnants: America’s Founding and the Western Tradition, ed. Gary L. Gregg II (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), 243–74.
5. According to the libertarian Benjamin Constant, “The interests and memories which spring from local customs contain a germ of resistance which is so distasteful to authority that it hastens to uproot it. Authority finds private individuals easier game; its enormous weight can flatten them out effortlessly as if they were so much sand” [emphasis added]. Alexis de Tocqueville noted in horror, “The old localized authorities disappear without either revival or replacement, and everywhere the central government succeeds them in the direction of affairs.” Livingston, “The Founding and the Enlightenment,” 251–52.
6. Thomas E. Woods, Jr., 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask (New York: Crown Forum, 2007), 78–79.
7. Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2009).
8. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Hutchinson, 1969 [1925–26]), 526.
9. Senate Bill No. 311; available at http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?101+sum+SB311.
10. House Bill 391; available at http://www.legislature.idaho.gov/legislation/2010/H0391.pdf.
11. Jeff Matthews, “To Our State Legislators: Nullification Requires Protection of Citizens,” March 29, 2010; available at http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2010/03/29/to-our-state-legislators-nullification-requires-protection-of-citizens/.
12. H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), 162. Emphasis added.
13. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, “The Lunatic Left Is Getting Desperate,” LewRockwell.com, March 22, 2010; available at http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo183.html.
14. Ibid.
15. These figures come from Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, cited in Charles Goyette, The Dollar Meltdown (New York: Portfolio, 2009), 34–35.
16. I realize that there are some constitutionalist circles in which the very words “constitutional convention” are enough to condemn someone forever. I used to hold the same view until it finally dawned on me: what exactly is the nightmare scenario we are supposed to fear? That an amendment may be proposed granting the Congress general (rather than limited and enumerated) legislative power? Even if three-fourths of the states could somehow be persuaded to adopt such a thing, that’s in practice what we already have. That the president may have a free hand in foreign affairs and domestic surveillance? We already have that. That the federal government may borrow and tax without limit? We have that, too. That a Federal Reserve System may destroy our money? We’re already there. It’s getting worse all the time, in spite of the enormous and ongoing educational efforts on the part of countless grassroots activists. This is partly because the system is stacked against us. It may need to be tipped back in the direction of the states and the people by means of structural change.
17. See Woods, 33 Questions, ch. 28; Clay S. Conrad, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1998).
18. Hampden (pseud.), The Genuine Book of Nullification (Charleston, SC: E. J. Van Brunt, 1831), 1. Emphasis added.
19. Jeff Woods, “State Legislator Says She Plans to Introduce ‘Nullification’ Bill,” Nashville City Paper, December 29, 2009; available at http://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/state-legislator-says-she-plans-introduce-nullification-bill.
20. Murray N. Rothbard, Libertarian Party Keynote Address, 1977; excerpted at http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard137.html.
21. Sanford Levinson, “States Can’t Nullify Federal Law,” Austin American-Statesman, February 6, 2010; available at http://www.statesman.com/opinion/insight/commentary-states-cant-nullify-federal-law-217250.html.
22. Ibid.
23. F. M. Anderson, “Contemporary Opinion of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions,” American Historical Review 5 (December 1899): 225–52.
24. State Documents on Federal Relations: The States and the United States, ed. Herman V. Ames (New York: Longmans, Green, 1911), 43–44. Emphasis added.
25. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and ’99; with Jefferson’s Original Draught Thereof, and Madison’s Report, Calhoun’s Address, Resolutions of the Several States in Relation to State Rights, with Other Documents in Support of the Jeffersonian Doctrines of ’98 (Washington, D.C.: Jonathan Elliot, 1832), 81.
26. William J. Watkins, Jr., Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and Their Legacy (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 117.
27. Thomas Jefferson to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. XV, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), 331–32.
28. Jon Roland, “Nullification is a Serious Option,” Austin American-Statesman, February 8, 2010; available at http://www.statesman.com/opinion/nullification-is-a-serious-option-221199.html. My summary of Roland’s views also derives from personal correspondence dated January 24, 2010.
About the Author
THOMAS E. WOODS, JR. (B.A., Harvard; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia) is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He is the author of ten books, including Who Killed the Constitution?: The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush (with Kevin R. C. Gutzman), 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask, and the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect GuideTM to American History and Meltdown.
Woods won the $50,000 first prize in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards for The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. Columbia University Press released his critically acclaimed 2004 book The Church Confronts Modernity in paperback in 2007. Woods’s books have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Polish, German, Portuguese, Croatian, Korean, Japanese, Czech, and Chinese.
Woods edited and wrote the introduction to four additional books: The Political Writings of Rufus Choate, Murray N. Rothbard’s The Betrayal of the American Right, We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (with Murray Polner), and Orestes Brownson’s 1875 classic The American Republic. He is also the author of Beyond Distributism, part of the Acton Institute’s Christian Social Thought Series.
Woods’s writing has appeared in dozens of popular and scholarly periodicals, including Investor’s Business Daily, American Historical Review, Christian Science Monitor, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Economic Affairs (U.K.), Modern Age, America
n Studies, Journal of Markets & Morality, New Oxford Review, University Bookman, Catholic Social Science Review, Independent Review, Human Rights Review, and Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines. A contributor to half a dozen encyclopedias, Woods is co-editor of Exploring American History: From Colonial Times to 1877, an 11-volume encyclopedia. He is also a contributing editor of The American Conservative magazine.
Woods has appeared on FOX News Channel, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg Television, FOX Business Network, and C-SPAN, among other outlets. He has been a guest on hundreds of radio programs, including the Dennis Miller Show, the Michael Reagan Show, the Michael Medved Show, and National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and On Point.
Woods lives in Auburn, Alabama, with his wife and four daughters, and maintains a website at TomWoods.com.
* Recall that in the 1790s, the Twelfth Amendment had not yet been added to the Constitution, so the candidate who received the greatest number of electoral votes became president, while the second-highest vote-getter became vice president. This was how John Adams, who belonged to the Federalist party, could have as his vice president Thomas Jefferson, the Republican.
* Nicholas and Randolph, the reader will recall, were Federalists who served on the five-man committee to draft Virginia’s ratification instrument. They spoke of a limited federal Union from whose unauthorized exercises of power Virginia would be exonerated.