The New Nullifiers

A Chattanooga TV station, no doubt reading from a news release, reported on Thursday that two Republicans in the Tennessee legislature (up in Nashville) have now introduced a bill that surely thrills the GOP supermajority.

I can also imagine it has President Andrew Jackson spinning in his grave out at the Hermitage.

This bill would put into our statutes that state authorities could exempt Tennessee from any executive order issued by President Joe Biden. This partisan gambit is chiefly more red meat for the defiant Trump remnant.

We shall see if this ill-timed, right-wing ploy goes anywhere – or nowhere, as it should – but stranger things have happened in our state’s current legislature. They frequently steer passionately by the wrong stars.

This new House Bill 1229 is pure mischief. It surely did not originate in the deep minds of its local sponsors. More likely, it was a hand-off from one of those national conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council. They will often get their minions in state capitals to oblige and introduce as their own.

There is important history to remember on this one. HB-1229 ought to remind us, most clearly, of the nation’s early fight over “nullification” - driven by southern zeal for the institution of slavery – and how it ultimately guided 11 states to insurrection and Civil War. The chief nullifier at the time was Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who in his day became Jackson’s chief nemesis. (Calhoun died in 1850 and did not live to see the shooting war begin at Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor.)

But the South Carolina legislature had set the disaster in motion when the constitutional convention it authorized adopted the “Ordinance of Nullification.” This declared the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 “null, void, and no law” so far as its state was concerned. They also threatened secession if the federal government tried to collect tariff duties by force.

Jackson then issued his “Proclamation to the People of South Carolina,” asserting the supremacy of the federal government and warning that “disunion by armed force is treason.”

Accordingly, this latest bill is just enough to get the bitter-enders to agitate further for their loony ideas about race and what they believe is the unfairness of life in general when Democrats win elections.

Nullification was not the only Issue between Jackson and Calhoun in their day, but it was one that lives in history even now.

After Jackson left the White House, in 1837, he was asked if he had any regrets about his time in office. He immediately thought of Calhoun and of the Kentucky senator Henry Clay.

“My only regrets,” he answered, “are that I never shot Henry Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun.”

© Keel Hunt, 2021