Thom Lambert was a constitutional law student of Barack Obama's when he taught at University of Chicago. Thom is mainly upset about the wording Obama made by Attacking the Supreme Court. Barack Obama should know better even if he want's Universal Healthcare. In my opinion I feel that this is pointless We all know Obama could care less about the constitution. Just as long as the Left get their European socialism enacted.
The SCOTUS is NOT the final say on our laws. We the People are. This is why the states have the power of nullification.
ReplyDeleteThe states could indeed nullify the act in question but nullification as it pertains to this act of Congress is much easier said than done. It would be a very dangerous precedent to set that the states would either shield their people from what the Congress has passed as a fee on those individuals from those states. Not to mention the states withholding payment to the feds for whatever reason they may come up with. This is far beyond asking the High Court to throw out a law as unconstitutional, which is where it should be decided. If the states decided to take extra steps if they lose this case in court to make sure they or their citizens are shielded from any fee, tax, or Congressional act under the statute in question they are barking up a tree I am not so sure they will be able to climb.
DeleteIn Cooper v. Aaron the Supreme Court decided this question of nullification from the states. The Warren court ruled that just because an individual state or municipality within that state may not agree with a court decision they had no right under the Constitution to disobey it. The same goes for the executive branch as well, which has in the past also tried to nullify the High Court's ruling, most famously by Andrew Jackson.
Could the states STILL nullify? They sure could. Of course the repercussions of this would most certainly be disastrous for the individuals of those states. A very similar argument was made by the what would become the Confederate states prior to the Civil War. They claimed they had the right to leave the Union, basing their very notion that the states prior to the inception of the Constitution were individual states and not bound by any federal power. In their minds, they held the right to leave that Union if they felt it was for the best of their state and their people. The states, in theory, nullified any connection with that federal power on the grounds that they helped create that union so the union could be dissolved at any time. Of course that is not the way the Union saw it at all, and we all know what happened after that.
Obviously our best hope is that the court strikes this down, because precedent to nullify is not on the state's side. of course they can do whatever they feel like doing, on the other hand the federal government could also do whatever they felt like doing in retaliation. In 1861 that meant blood in the fields, in 2012 that probably means no federal money being sent to the states and in turn another Union split.
We the people are the final say on these laws because we elect those who re-enact them or repeal them. if the state truly had the right to disobey any federal law they felt unconstitutional, would we not be just a group of states under no federal jurisdiction what so ever? In my eyes, nullification (and even the Warren Court saw this) disbands any kind of agreement that was made between the individual states when they formed the Union. If the states wanted their word to be the final word, there would be very little use for a Supreme Court that had a power of judicial review.