We had a post earlier this month here at the site by Chris Alexander of the Louisiana Citizens’ Advocacy Group on SCR 21, one of the most controversial measures Louisiana’s legislature passed in the session which ended a couple of weeks ago, and it seems the subject of Chris’ post remains reasonably hot.

That being Louisiana’s assertion in SCR 21 that the state has the power to nullify unconstitutional actions by the federal government.

Alexander wrote that the resolution is rooted in a long tradition of American political doctrine that states are a counterbalance to federal power…

In the 1798 Kentucky Resolutions, which nullified the federal Alien and Sedition Acts, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the States who agreed to ratify the Constitution are “sovereign and independent” within their sphere, and that whenever the federal government acts without constitutional authority, “nullification is the rightful remedy.” Indeed, neither the Constitution nor the revolutionary experiment in liberty it secured would have been possible had there been any question about the States’ right to nullify federal acts that violate state sovereignty. It was an express condition of entering into the constitutional compact. Alexander Hamilton, who believed in a strong central government, nonetheless said in Federalist 33 that any law passed by Congress that was not enacted “pursuant to its constituted powers will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such.”  (Emphasis added).

SCR 21 is a well written defense of state sovereignty, and a declaration by our State Legislature that it need no longer yield to the steady erosion of our individual freedom by a monolithic federal government. Both Senator Stewart Cathey, and Representative Alan Seabaugh, who carried the Resolution on the House floor, deserve praise for their efforts.  To paraphrase Felix Adler, the statesman is the one who sets blazing torches of liberty in the dark streets of tyranny so that others may see. SCR 21 is just such a torch, lit by Cathey and Seabaugh, as well as the legislators who supported it to final passage. May states around the Country be emboldened to follow suit.

The point of the resolution is not that Louisiana aims to secede from the United States or to pick and choose what laws passed by Congress it will follow or cooperate with. It’s that actions of the federal government, and specifically bureaucratic actions which are far outside the bounds of the Constitution (something the Supreme Court has been increasingly mindful, and reproachful, of), can and should be countered by state action.

When the federal government acts outside the bounds of the Constitution and those actions harm the interests of the state of Louisiana or its people, then Louisiana’s state government can and should act to stop the federal usurpations from taking effect here.

This isn’t a particularly radical notion, by the way. States nullifying unconstitutional and harmful federal actions has been a tradition in American governance which is neither revolutionary nor uncommon. Most of the time nowadays, such action takes the form of a state attorney general, or a host of them, running into federal court and getting injunctive relief against the federal government.

That’s literally most of what Jeff Landry’s office trumpets, at least over the past couple of years. Landry’s been involved in dozens of lawsuits seeking to dissolve unconstitutional and harmful actions of the Biden administration’s bureaucrats.

All SCR 21 does is restate the principle behind those actions in the form of a legislative proclamation defending them and cheerleading for more. If you want to criticize the resolution your best argument is that it has no effect because all that it declares has long been the case.

But the “conservative” columnist at The Advocate, Quin Hillyer, who at one time was credible in his ideological statements, spent a weekend column assaulting Louisiana’s legislature for passing SCR 21.

Sixty-seven members of the Louisiana House and 27 state senators have embarrassed themselves and the state by adopting a loony-radical resolution saying the state has “the sovereign right” to “nullify unconstitutional acts of the federal government.”

This “nullification” idea is demonstrably, factually wrong — and dangerous. It was already discredited long before the Civil War by none other than “Father of the Constitution” James Madison. And that war itself, at the cost of some 750,000 lives, settled the issue once and for all.

Ranting racists such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace tried, maliciously and unsuccessfully, to revive it in the 1960s, to the effect that any assertion of nullification powers today automatically carries with it the stench of the foulest bigotry.

Hillyer’s reasoning is bizarre, as he trashed the Kentucky resolutions and brought up James Madison – specifically citing quotes by Madison about the Supreme Court’s role as the final tribunal of constitutionality and so forth. Everything in his reasoning seems to fail on the simple fact that what SCR 21 covers is unconstitutional acts by the federal government.

Not Supreme Court rulings, and not bills passed by Congress.

And he ends it this way…

The resolution is bizarre. It is akin to an eighth-grade student council telling a school principal that the council on its own authority can abrogate school rules. And, because nullification’s history is ineluctably associated with the worst of this nation’s racial sins, the resolution makes Louisiana appear, to the rest of the country, to be a hotbed for redneck racists.

Fortunately, as a mere resolution rather than an actual law, the Legislature’s nullification screed is no more than hot air or a vague threat of future action. Still, even that is bad enough. The resolution should be repealed. The governor should reconvene the Legislature, post-haste, to nullify its embarrassing handiwork.

There is something difficult to understand about Hillyer’s writing where Louisiana comes to mind, which is that he has such a bee in his bonnet on the question of “redneck racists” here that he will go from zero to 60 in less than a second in condemning anything he thinks the rednecks might like.

So because George Wallace was a fan of nullification, Louisiana can’t take a position that Team Biden’s bureaucratic attempts to trash election integrity or the EPA’s overweening regulatory aggressions against our industries are a usurpation of power?

Something tells us that this talk about eighth-grade student councils is a bit loud for polite conversation given the source.

It’s really a shame to see Hillyer shilling – wittingly or otherwise – for Team Biden in the pages of a newspaper funded by leftist NGO’s. He’s traded any credibility he might have had for the king’s coin. And the rest of us have no further obligation to pay him any heed at all.

Though we’ll remember his screechings the next time we run across his critiques of federal government overreach – which will likely resurface the next time there’s a Republican in the White House.