“Nullification” as a legal doctrine, is very simply, invalidating a law by ignoring it, ruling against it, writing it out of existence, or refusing to enforce or obey it. When states nullify a federal law, it’s often called “interposition,” but that’s just fancy talk.
Among too many who even understand their meaning, the words “nullification” and “interposition” have somehow acquired a simultaneously religious, conspiratorial and rebellious meaning.
That is weird, because nullification and interposition happen every day, everywhere in the USA.
If you look up the terms on a legal site or Wikipedia, you will likely read that the practice has never been upheld in court. But that’s bunk-in-action.
Practically all legislation, Executive Orders, bureaucratic rules; practically every high court case and government action at every level nullifies some part of our constitutions, our laws and culture. Courts nullify legislation all the time…it actually is part of their job. And it’s absolutely the job of Executives (Governors, the POTUS) to nullify, by denying execution, unconstitutional laws, agencies, expenditures and actions.
Sometimes the nullification is subtle and by parts; such as laws restricting or licensing the right to weapons, or nationalizing our state militias, which increasingly nullify the Second Amendment and our whole constitutional and social design for peace, sane foreign policy, and self-defense.
Sometimes it’s overt; such as when President Obama and the DOJ nullified the Defense Of Marriage Act in 2011; or when Obama essentially nullified the 2006 Secure Fence Act (he wasn’t wrong about DOMA – the church should never have handed marriage over to Caesar). Or when the FCC started regulating the internet in violation of a federal court order (very wrong). …Or when Kim Davis attempted to nullify both a Judge’s and Governor’s nullification of an Amendent of the Kentucky Constitution which nullified the federal constitution (that was a lot of nullification, and Davis was wrong to do it).
Or when states decriminalize the use of a plant that never should’ve been criminalized by “federal” “law” (both of those words having by now lost all their original meaning).
Sometimes the nullification is from ignorance. Who’s read their state constitution, for instance…so how would anybody know when politicians violate it?
Sometimes it is by brute force when a ‘roid-raging cop nullifies rights literally to death.
Rarely, some smart-Alec citizen invokes a jury’s right to nullify bad laws or bad application of law. (Juries have tremendous power; though judges never tell jurors that anymore).
Our constitutions have been effectively nullified by the endless stream of political prohibitions and mandates, subsidies and taxes, regulations and corruption absolutely prohibited in the clear writing of our constitutions, both state and federal.
However you look at it, and from every level of government, from the citizen on up, nullification happens every single day.
Every Single Day.
Let that sink in a minute.
Every day.
It happens.
All the time.
Everywhere.
Up to now, there’s been a malevolent direction to that nullification…
In order to make governments, bureaucracies, corporations and programs bigger, costlier, more heavily armed and aggressive, more intrusive, more secretive and even more corrupt (though that last part is getting very hard to do), constitutions at both state and federal levels, had to be nullified.
Not all nullification has been bad. Courts have nullified what used to be the “settled law” (stare decisis) of past generations in some good ways. Slavery exists now mostly in other countries, and our Jim Crow laws are gone, thank God. But the power the federal government gobbled up in the meantime has been used to heap entirely different evils upon us, such that now, our trans-generational debt/theft machines and their incessant wars are about to cause us horrible grief.
Our country is ours, collectively. But my vote is mine alone. It is my weapon. I won’t waste it anymore on the status quo mess. I mean to use my power of peaceful revolution as intended.
So here’s all that I will vote for:
I want two things from every level of politics, and every politician:
1. A federal 10th Amendment / Indiana Article I Section 25 view of our constitutions.
2. Nullification of everything else from from our lives.
I want our constitutions, state and federal, reinstated, by nullifying everything that violates them. In other words, I want to go legit, and govern our government…as is the actual, written law.
And I won’t vote for any less than that.
But let’s take this one step further… A big step further.
What are citizens supposed to do when the government oversteps its bounds and stomps on our rights? Are our only weapons in the ballot box and ammo box? Must we resort to courts that are more often than not the actual defenders of corruption and constitutional violations?
Claim our rights! Resist! Peacefully disobey! In the streets, in our homes, in our businesses and in juries, we are to nullify!
Article I Section 19 of our Indiana Constitution even enumerates the right of juries to nullify laws: “In all criminal cases whatever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts.”
In other words, we should, as individual citizens in the ordinary course of our lives as well as in official civic duties, nullify all laws, actions, agencies, taxes, fees, programs and agents that transgress their written authority.
After all, as Ben Franklin said, “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God!”
We Declare 