A few days ago the Marco Island City Council, an assembly of the brightest constitutional scholars in the nation, decided to pass a resolution that would nullify any action that would, in effect, dilute the Second Amendment rights of its citizens to bear arms.\u00c2\u00a0 Prior to that action, Lee County Sheriff, Mike Scott, had indicated that he would not enforce any law that would restrict gun rights as he believes it would be against the Second Amendment.\u00c2\u00a0 There apparently are plans\u00c2\u00a0at an upcoming meeting of the Collier County Commissioners to\u00c2\u00a0vote on the same resolution as the one the Marco Island Council passed.<\/p>\n
It seems that in the history of the United States nullification efforts have never been successful and have often led to dire consequences.\u00c2\u00a0 One of the first acts of\u00c2\u00a0nullification,\u00c2\u00a0Shay’s Rebellion,\u00c2\u00a0occurred in 1786 and 1787 protesting taxes levied by the State of Massachusetts.\u00c2\u00a0 Although this act of nullification was, in fact, against the State of Massachusetts rather than the federal government (the federal government had no standing army available to suppress it at the time), it resulted in the suppression of the rebellion by the state militia and the eventual execution of 18 individuals involved in the rebellion.<\/p>\n
In 1832 the State of South Carolina declared that the tariffs imposed by the federal government in 1828 were unconstitutional and would not be enforced.\u00c2\u00a0 Only a compromise on the tariff issue engineered by Henry Clay avoided federal troops being sent to South Carolina by President Andrew Jackson.\u00c2\u00a0 The compromise, however, only had the effect of postponing the Civil War by three decades (effectively “kicking the can down the road”).<\/p>\n
The issue that precipitated the Civil War was the ultimate attempt at nullification: secession.\u00c2\u00a0 Over 600,000 lives were lost\u00c2\u00a0over this attempt to nullify federal authority.\u00c2\u00a0 One would think that this would have settled the issue.<\/p>\n
In the 1950’s Arkansas attempted to nullify federal desegregation law.\u00c2\u00a0 The result was that President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to force the admission of black students into public schools, despite Governor\u00c2\u00a0Orville Faubus’ attempts to\u00c2\u00a0block their entry into the schools.<\/p>\n
In the 1960’s we again\u00c2\u00a0saw federal troops\u00c2\u00a0being dispatched, this time to Alabama, to enforce federal desegregation laws.<\/p>\n
In 2012 we witnessed Texas Governor Rick Perry, in his presidential campaign,\u00c2\u00a0bringing up the idea of Texas seceding again\u00c2\u00a0from the Union. Fortunately, no one took\u00c2\u00a0his idea\u00c2\u00a0(or his campaign) seriously, so no additional federal troops had to be sent to Texas (there are already a lot of them there).<\/p>\n
The bottom line is that it\u00c2\u00a0has been\u00c2\u00a0pretty much settled that the federal courts are supposed to rule on the constitutionality of our laws, and not the elected state legislatures, sheriffs, city councils, county commissioners, etc., who all take an oath of office to uphold the law and not render their own interpretations as to the validity of each law.\u00c2\u00a0 The consequences of doing otherwise appear to be pretty dire in the history of our nation.\u00c2\u00a0 Hopefully, we will not experience federal troops marching down I-75 or over the Jolly Bridge in the near future in order to restore the rule of federal law.<\/p>\n
Perhaps\u00c2\u00a0a more apt\u00c2\u00a0term for\u00c2\u00a0nullification\u00c2\u00a0is subversion?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few days ago the Marco Island City Council, an assembly of the brightest constitutional scholars in the nation, decided to pass a resolution that would nullify any action that would, in effect, dilute the Second Amendment rights of its …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1328"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1331,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328\/revisions\/1331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}