Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is my friend Tom Woods, full disclosure, I'm friends with Tom Woods and I already agree with him about just about everything, on just about everything.
Tom has his plain old degree from Harvard, his advanced degree from Columbia, he's the author of a great many books, in fact I guess I'll just tell you all of them.
The Church Confronts Modernity, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Sacred Then and Sacred Now, The Return of the Old Latin Mass, Who Killed the Constitution, The Fate of American Liberty, From World War I to George W. Bush with Kevin Gutzman, 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask, The Church and the Market, A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, Which Free Economy?
We Who Dared Say No to War, American Anti-War Writing from 1812 to now co-edited with Murray Polner, Meltdown, A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, The Economy Tanked and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, and the brand new one is Nullification, How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, also did I neglect to mention Tom is a fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, that's mises.org.
Welcome back to the show Tom, how the hell are you?
Doing great Scott, glad to be here as always.
Hey, great job on this book, congratulations man.
Thank you, thank you sir.
Very good.
All right, so I'm going to try to fight with you, although of course I already agree with you, but I'll do my best to be a devil's advocate here.
Let's make it fun, yeah.
Yeah, there you go.
I'm going to start with this one.
Is it constitutional for the U.S. government to garrison the planet?
Well, I don't see anything in the constitution that talks about that.
I don't see any mandate for that.
Well, there's certainly no mandate for it, but Article 1, Section 8 gives Congress the power to tax and the power to raise armies.
Article 2 gives the president the power to command them.
Yeah, that's true, that certainly is true, but at the same time it rests in the hands of Congress almost what's supposed to.
I mean, let's let the whole thing become a joke, but it's supposed to rest in the hands of Congress.
The vast majority of policy making with regard to foreign policy, most of these policy making aspects are either held by Congress or held jointly by the president and the senate.
There's very little that's assigned entirely to the president, and yet the overseas empire and all this is really an outgrowth of the executive state, of an enormous reservoir of powers placed into the hands of the president.
So that aspect alone, whereby the president basically runs the empire, runs the world, directs the wars, declares the wars, this is clearly out of step with the constitution.
And I feel almost silly pointing out, you know, well, gee, this violates the constitution as if this is a surprise, or we shouldn't have expected this, or this is unusual behavior on their part, but, you know, I'm just telling you the facts as I understand them.
Although, you know, like I'm thinking about, and it's been a long time, so forgive me, but isn't it the case that in the Federalist Papers, which again, you know, for, not again, but for people who aren't familiar, that's Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay's anonymous essays in the New York press to try to convince people to ratify the constitution.
Didn't they basically argue that, look, of course the president has the power to respond if we're attacked.
The power to declare war is about if we want to start one.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
That's why...
I mean, so they're basically, they've reserved the power of Congress to begin aggressive wars right there from the get-go.
Yeah, absolutely.
In fact, interestingly enough, Lincoln said to a correspondent that that was precisely his understanding of what the framers had done.
That was their own understanding.
Alexander Hamilton, who favored, you know, I mean, a strong central government, you know, and a powerful presence in the world, said that, you know, we're totally different from the British king.
The president is totally different because the president, he can defend the country if there's a sudden surprise attack.
He can make war in that one particular instance, but otherwise it's the Congress that declares the war.
It's not the president as it would be with the king in England.
I guess I don't want to stay too much on the war thing because, well, here's a segue into the rest of the book.
You talk in the book about how, and again, the book is called Nullification, and it's about, I guess, the states interposing themselves, right?
Interposition and preventing the national government from violating the Constitution or the theory that they ought to.
And one of the examples that you use is state governments at least complaining and passing resolutions to try to get the National Guard units brought home from overseas.
Yeah, I think that this movement bears a very strong family resemblance to the idea of nullification.
You've had Ben Manski on your program, who is part of the, or is running the Bring the Guard Home movement.
But yeah, this basically boils down to people's understanding of the National Guard is that the National Guard is sort of composed of citizen soldiers who stay home.
That's sort of the point of the National Guard, is that the National Guard, in the term.
Whereas the National Guard, I mean, hundreds of thousands of them have been called up for repeated tours in this whole Iraq fiasco.
And what we're starting to see in some states is a movement to try to reclaim power over the militia, well, pardon me, the successor of the militia, the National Guard, on the part of the governors.
And it's interesting that this is a movement that has won the support, not just of political liberals, but also there are conservatives, World Net Daily, which is the sort of big sort of neocon site, supports this.
The 10th Amendment Center, the libertarians, military families, they all agree this is not the role the National Guard is supposed to have.
And this used to be a check that the governors had, that we in the states had.
We actually had a check, to some degree, on federal power when it came to war making, that you can call up the militia, or in this case the National Guard, only if these particular conditions hold.
If the country is invaded, or there's an insurrection, or it's absolutely necessary in order to execute the laws of the union.
That is it.
Not because somebody's got a hangnail in Pakistan or whatever, or because the president has some imperial ambition somewhere.
That is not, those are not among the constitutional requirements for federalizing the National Guard and calling them up and just sending them wherever you like.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so I guess, you know, I got to try to confront the basic junior high school or University of Texas understanding of the role of government.
And, you know, I only dropped out of junior college, but I one time had a UT government professor in my taxi cab, and I asked her, hey, so what do you teach them about the necessary and proper clause?
Do you teach them that it says that Congress can do whatever is necessary and proper?
Or do you finish the sentence that it's for carrying out the foregoing listed powers in Article 1, Section 8?
And she said, I have no idea what you're talking about.
I was afraid she'd give the wrong answer.
She doesn't even understand the question.
Yeah, yeah.
Necessary and what?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, see, that's, you know, in the nullification in the book, I actually start off with going through a few of these clauses that normally they try to appeal to if anyone bothers to ask them where they're even getting their constitutional authority.
And that's one of them, necessary and proper.
A lot of us learned in junior high that this is the elastic clause that pretty much covers everything, allows the federal government to do whatever it wants.
Obviously, nobody, I don't care which one of the framers we're talking about, nobody would have embraced an elastic clause.
This would have appalled everyone.
In fact, there was something like an elastic clause proposed.
It was proposed that the legislature, that the Congress, should have general legislative power.
So that would be like an elastic clause, that you can just do whatever you want.
That was overwhelmingly rejected.
I mean, everybody said, no, no, no, of course we don't want that.
We want enumerated powers.
And in fact, again, even Alexander Hamilton said in the Federalist Papers, the Constitution would be exactly the same if we obliterated the necessary and proper clause.
It would be exactly the same.
It just clarifies that if we say the federal government can erect needful buildings, that, well, okay, it can purchase lumber to construct a needful building.
Obvious things like that.
It does not mean it can do anything that it thinks might be necessary or proper in some general open-ended sense.
Right.
Well, and I don't want to just put this aside.
Maybe we can get back to it.
I guess we went on too much time to discuss the whole debate over whether the states or the people created the U.S. Constitution.
Is that the bumper music you're already playing?
Man, all my clocks are wrong.
But, well, the point we're going to get back to on the other side of this break is whether any of this is really relevant when most of the states were created really by acts of Congress long after the Constitution, after there's been a civil war and all these things, a new deal, and everything that's changed since then, the living constitution, they call it.
We'll be back.
This is the Liberty Radio Network broadcasting the latest Liberty-oriented audio content 24 hours a day at LRN.
FM.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Tom Woods.
That's Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Just go to TomWoods.com.
It'll forward you on to the site there.
Of course, he's a fellow at the Mises Institute, and he's the author of the new book, Nullification, How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.
And now, Tom, I got to tell you, I can't dispute a thing you say in here about the Jeffersonian view of the construction of the Constitution, and it's a creature of the states, and the states are, not the states is, and all these kinds of things.
But then again, they like to say, that was a long time ago.
And in fact, as far as precedent set, it was the first Washington administration when Thomas Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State over the fight over the Second Bank of the United States.
And he told George Washington, if you sign this law, which you know there's no constitutional provision for Congress to do this, if you sign this, you'll be stepping onto a boundless field of power from which there will never be any retreat, and Washington signed it anyway.
And then, by the time Jefferson was president, he's trying to get us into a war with England, he's buying Louisiana from the French, who didn't even own it.
There was a Civil War, and boy, it was the Union at the beginning of the Civil War.
It's the nation now.
I mean, that was, and even then, that was 150 years ago.
All right, well, let's unpack this.
First of all, I don't want to assume that, although you have a very intelligent, unusually intelligent listenership, unlike most of the zombie programs out there, I still don't want to assume they know what nullification is.
So I do just want to explain, very quickly, it's Jefferson's idea that if the federal government goes beyond its delegated powers, that the states within their borders should refuse to enforce that law.
James Madison said in 1798 that the states are duty-bound to resist when the federal government goes too far.
Now, the point that you're making are all...
That could have been my first question of the interview, right?
What's nullification, Tom?
That's quite right, but you and I talk about this, like, all the time.
We figure everybody's on board.
This is stuff that I think it's useful to see revived.
I've been happy and pleasantly surprised that a subject I've been writing on as a historian, I'm suddenly writing on as a current events commentator.
This is a pleasant unexpected thing.
But you're right, of course.
I mean, look, we're dealing with governments here, and you and I have exactly the same philosophy of government, which is screw them.
You know, I mean, it's impossible to limit them, basically, in the long run.
What I'm trying to do, simply, is I recognize all the things you're saying.
You're right.
I mean, constitutions, pieces of paper, forget it.
You know, these are sociopaths, and good luck trying to limit them.
But the fact is that some governments have been more limited than others.
Some have been more predatory than others.
Some have been less.
So, you know, I've got four little kids here, so I'm just trying to think, what can I do?
What practical steps can I take that might be able to stall them a little bit, that might be able to push them back a little bit?
And that's why I'm proposing this, even though you're right, there have been a lot of changes over the years.
There's been this and that.
But, you know, a valid principle is a valid principle.
I mean, really, I don't think if people were talking about free speech, they'd say, oh, that's First Amendment.
Come on, that's so 1791.
Give me a break.
Nobody would accept that.
And this is basically a hallowed principle.
I mean, look at what we just celebrated, the freaking Fourth of July, the right to throw off the bans that bind you politically.
Well, who's going to say, well, that's just old hat.
We don't do that anymore.
Screw that.
No, yes, we absolutely do.
And so, today, it seems to me, I don't see any way of holding these people back, other than by pitting institutions against institutions, states against the federal government.
I don't see that there's anything else.
And maybe this won't work.
I'm not selling you a product here.
Like, I don't know for a fact it's going to work, but I know that we've tried every other freaking thing and it hasn't worked.
Right.
Well, and, you know, history is always such a bummer because, and certainly you had to deal with this in your interview with the zombie the other day, and I'm sure you'll have to deal with this in the future.
People who hold the idea, I want to tar them with the history of others who purported to believe in the idea.
And of course, you know, those, the white supremacists who refused to give up their power in the South until forced from above to do so, hid behind the reserved powers of the states and the limited powers of the national government to the very end in order to, not really to justify, but in order to continue getting away with the worst sin.
And so now they kind of took the idea down with them and they sort of established the precedent that the national government, when it comes down to it, the national government is better on these most important issues than the state governments are.
Okay.
Yeah.
Let me, let me take this one head on.
First of all, obviously there's nothing inherently good or bad about saying one level of government rather than another one should handle this or that.
I mean, because you can get bad people at any level of government.
So true.
I mean, the federal government, after all, imprisoned a lot of those Japanese Americans in concentration camps.
The states didn't do that.
I wish the states had nullified that.
It was the states that protected Blacks from the federal fugitive slave laws by just saying, well, no one's going to leave our state without a jury trial, because we have a right to protect our citizens against potential kidnapping.
But finally, on the Southern issue, the thing is that right now Blacks have the right to vote in the South, which they didn't have before.
And this is one of the reasons Blacks are moving to the South on net.
They're not moving to the North on net.
They're moving to the South as they have been for the past 25 years.
And the reason is that life has changed.
Things have changed here.
It's not, it's not a Birmingham, 1963 anymore.
And the fact is that those abuses to which Blacks were subject were a function of the fact that the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was not being enforced.
So there was a constitutional remedy for that.
And in fact, when you want to talk about the segregation of the schools, Michael Klarman is a University of Virginia historian who won the Bancroft Prize for a book looking at the court decisions regarding education.
What he discovered was really the court decisions had almost zero impact on real life on the ground in the South.
So what actually did do the trick?
It was giving Blacks the right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the Constitution.
So the Constitution, in fact, had a remedy for this, which is once they got the right to vote, well, gee, suddenly the politicians decided they wanted to maybe not be these people's mortal enemies anymore.
So the point is that today the landscape is totally different because of voting rights.
And just look, look at the situation.
Look at Washington, D.C.
Nothing ever changes.
You get Obama.
He's supposed to be this big radical change.
He's more of the same.
We all knew it.
You and I knew it.
A lot of people were fooled by that.
This is where the threat to our liberties are coming from.
The threat to our liberties today are not coming from North Carolina, the state capital.
They're not coming from Boston, primarily.
They're coming from Washington, D.C.
I mean, right now today, 2010.
So in fact, I will pledge on your program, Scott, that if nullification begins to be revived, and if any time in the next 50 years nullification is anywhere used to bring back segregation, I hereby pledge to donate in 2010 dollars $100,000 to the charity of the New York Times choosing.
No, no, not the New York Times.
I won't have to do it, Scott.
I guarantee you.
I guarantee we all know that's not going to happen.
I will donate a million dollars to raise a private militia to invade that state and liberate the people.
Yeah, there you go.
Exactly.
We'll save the money and do that.
And see, here's the thing, too.
First principles.
You mentioned the Declaration of Independence there.
First principles.
People are born free.
They allow governments to exist.
They delegate rights that they have, such as their natural right to defend their own life to governments to protect them.
And another major principle here is no matter how old the law is, you mentioned the First Amendment there, the law is the law.
And if the Constitution is not the law, then what is it other than a blank check for George Bush and Nancy Pelosi and whoever to do whatever they want with us?
That's the real thing.
We're going to get back to that right after this break.
Tom Woods, author of Nullification.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates.lrn.fm and join us on Facebook at Facebook dot lrn dot fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with my friend Tom Woods.
His website is Tom Woods dot com.
He's a scholar at the Mises Institute.
He's the author.
We dared say no to war.
Well, co-editor of We Who Dared Say No to War, author of Meltdown, author of Nullification, How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.
And we're going out to break.
I was asking you, Tom, about the principle or I was trying to figure out a way to phrase it in the form of a question, the principle about whether the Constitution is the law or whether it's not.
And, you know, you and I've talked about the Gulf War on the show before, and I still remember.
I think it was during the Gulf War that I realized that, wow, Congress isn't declaring war here.
How does that work?
And it was explained to me that, well, the way it's worked since World War Two is if the U.N. says it's OK, then the president can do it and then, you know, Congress can either authorize it or not.
But they always do.
And that's just kind of a change that's been adopted over the years.
I think Henry Hyde explained the same thing to Ron Paul in the run up to the Iraq war, that the power of Congress to declare war is an anachronism.
And so that's, you know, goes to the question of whether the Constitution is the law or not.
If it's really an anachronism, then they need to change that part of Article One, Section Eight, it would seem, rather than just ignore it.
But then that also leads to another question, which is, is nullification legal rather than lawless anarchy and danger?
Yeah.
Well, actually, I say, hooray to lawless anarchy.
But let's get back to on the Constitution thing.
Yeah, I mean, I've spent, I mean, in Who Killed the Constitution?in 33 Questions and a Politically Incorrect Guide, I've dealt with the presidential versus congressional war power thing.
And the argument is just so overwhelming.
It's just laughable that there could even be a debate on this question, that the neocons are at their obfuscating worst on this when they, they, I've just every claim they make that, oh, hundreds of times in American history, presidents have sent troops without congressional declaration of war.
It's all BS when you actually unpack it.
So yeah.
So could the state of California or the state of Texas nullify the recruitment of their kids to go fight unconstitutional wars, Tom?
Well, I'd love to see it.
I'd love to see it.
If the, if the, would that be a legitimate Jeffersonian use of nullification and interposition?
I don't know that one, Scott, I've done a lot of interviews so far, that one, I gotta, I gotta think that over.
I mean, on a natural, from a natural rights point of view, of course, I completely agree that the state should protect people from being shipped off unconstitutionally into a war.
I have to think that one over.
I have to think that one over.
We might have to fight that one on other grounds, but, but maybe, maybe it could be used.
I suspect though, that for nullification to work in the beginning, anyway, it has to be applied to an area that there's a reasonably broad-based consensus about.
And unfortunately right now people are still cheering, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They'll tell the pollster that they're kind of against the war, but they don't think about it.
It doesn't really matter to them.
Some towel head gets killed.
They don't think about that.
So I, I don't know how promising that is, unfortunately.
And it breaks my heart to say that, because for me, the most important issue of all is the war issue.
So I don't know that this is the most fruitful place to start, but...
Yeah, nullify the empire.
That obviously is the most important issue of all.
Yeah, that should be my next book, Nullify the Empire.
Golly, that'd be great.
Well, on the, on the lawfulness of nullification, basically the quick answer to that is that what matters is the intentions of the people who ratify the Constitution.
Like, what did they think they were getting themselves into?
And I focus on Virginia, because Virginia was probably the most important of the first states.
So many of our important statesmen came from Virginia.
And so when it came time to consider the Constitution there, at their ratifying convention in 1788, you had Patrick Henry saying, look, this Constitution has loopholes.
You can drive a truck through it.
Why would we want to go along with this thing?
And to reassure him, it was supporters of the Constitution who said, oh, don't worry, don't worry.
No, no, forget it.
Don't worry about that general welfare clause.
The federal government has only the powers expressly, they use the word expressly, delegated to it.
And then George Nicholas, who became the first attorney general of Kentucky, and who served on the committee to draft the ratification instrument of Virginia, said, look, if, if the federal government goes beyond the powers that are listed in here, don't worry, Virginia will be exonerated from it.
All we have to do is just point to the statute and say, no, wait a minute, we never gave you that power, and we won't have to enforce it.
So in other words, there is a presumption of nullification at the Virginia ratifying convention.
And even with that presumption, even still, Virginia barely ratified, a very close vote, barely ratified the Constitution even then.
So I point to that and say, you know, I didn't make this up.
It wasn't Tom Woods making this up.
You can look at the ratifying convention records.
And I think that's a reasonably good place to start.
And then you see going into the 1790s, Patrick Henry is beginning to give voice to this principle.
He's saying, look, the federal government is already going beyond the powers delegated to it.
We were promised at the ratifying convention that we would not be responsible.
We would not have to cooperate in this if it went this far.
I mean, so these ideas are not just coming from one person or from Tom Woods or whatever, but you see them in Thomas Jefferson at the ratifying convention with Patrick Henry.
You know, I'll take these guys any day.
Well, no, I mean, I guess you're right, because they went on to to reassure him and they added the the Bill of Rights with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments on there.
I was going to say, I mean, if he's right about all these loopholes, then maybe all these things aren't really unconstitutional.
But then, as you're saying, they, you know, did these extra efforts.
In fact, the Bill of Rights has a preamble to it that says that these are additional declaratory and restrictive clauses in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers by the new national government there.
Except that no one ever reads that preamble to the Bill of Rights.
Yeah, and by the way, it's not included in the Constitution in your book.
Ah, it is.
It is included in the Constitution that's in our book, the book Who Killed the Constitution.
So there's a total oversight on my part.
I let the publisher get away with that.
We'll get it in the favor back.
But I mean, basically, the long and short of it is, you know, as I said, we basically tried everything.
We voted for Stooges.
We voted for Stooges who give pretty speeches.
We've, you know, we've sent in petitions.
We've, you know, I mean, might as well give this a shot.
And basically what it amounts to is like a declaration of civil disobedience on the part of the state saying, look, you know, we know you have the tanks and we don't.
But the fact is, we're not doing this.
So we better have a meeting of the minds here.
Right.
We're not doing it.
So what do we do about that?
Now, here's the thing.
When we come back from the break, I want you to tell the story all about Wisconsin and, you know, the history of the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act and some other examples, even resistance to Madison's draft and so forth throughout American history.
But right now, real quick, if you could just list for us a few of the issues where the states are right now defying the federal government, there are quite a few of them beyond just bring the guard home.
Yeah, that's right.
There was the Real I.D.
Act, which is what really inspired me when I realized that a couple dozen states saying we're not doing it and the thing just went away.
Of course, there's medical marijuana.
The Supreme Court even said you can't do it and they're still doing it.
That's the most glorious thing of all.
They're still doing it anyway.
People are talking about cap and trade nullification.
They're talking about handguns.
They're talking about the health care legislation.
There are all kinds of areas to which this could be applied.
And, you know, Vermont might want to nullify a different law from Kansas and different one from California.
Well, great, because you know what that would mean?
It would mean that we would get the real America where different places are different.
You know, you live your way and I live mine.
Gee, what a terrible catastrophe that would be.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's really the thing is we got this whole silly left right thing and the left and right often can come together on nationalism and authoritarianism and war, but they can also come together on, you know, good civil libertarian type things as well.
And it seems like, you know, liberals could see some beauty in strict construction and a very Republican federalized form of government, meaning the opposite of nationalized, the old definition of federalized.
And of course, conservatives as nationalists as they can be sometimes.
That's the one thing they claim to want to conserve more than anything else is the actual law as written in the Constitution.
Right.
And I'm just I'm just thinking now I forgot to mention California is considering decriminalizing marijuana across the board this fall.
Right.
Which is an outright defiance of the federal government.
I mean, that is great.
We shouldn't be condemning them.
We should be congratulating them.
And I'd like to see cities across the country say, you know, you can have your crazy drug war, but we're not going to devote any resources to it.
How do you like that?
Oh, man.
See, that's a good one.
You need to be leading with that one right there.
The drug war.
Everybody's so afraid of talking about it, Tom, but you're just the right character to get the point across to, I'll tell you.
Thank you, everybody.
We're going to be right back with Thomas E. Woods, author of Nullification, right after this.
What's up next?
Visit the Liberty Radio Network program guide to find out at shows dot lrn dot fm that shows dot lrn dot fm.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
Scott Horton, I'm talking with renowned anti-imperialist Tom Woods, Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Tom Woods dot com is his website.
Mises dot org is where he's a senior fellow.
Nullification, how to resist federal tyranny in the 21st century is his brand new book.
And I admit this is not the most organized I've ever been in conducting an interview, Tom, but it's all good stuff is out of order, as it might be.
I was hoping you could take us back through the great and proud American historical tradition of nullification and interposition, beginning with the principles of 1798.
Yeah, absolutely.
And Scott, I love our conversation because when I'm on with you on an interview like this, it's like you and I are just this is how we talk on the phone, right?
It's like I can't remember if I'm talking to you on the phone or if I'm on the air.
It's great.
Same difference.
That's what I try to tell.
Like, sometimes the guests are nervous and I say, nah, it's just you and me on the phone.
It's fine.
Yeah, we're just having a chat on the phone.
That's right.
Now, a chat over a few drinks would be even better.
I don't know if we can record that, but all the same, 1798 is the year of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which have just sort of fallen down the Orwellian memory hole.
Like if you go to Facebook, the Constitution has like 50 billion fans.
The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which I urge somebody to start a fan page for, they've got like 300 fans.
What the heck is this?
Get the heck over there.
So it's these documents that where you hear these principles of Virginia, the Kentucky Resolutions of 1799 include the word nullification.
Nullification is the rightful remedy, it says.
They're basically saying that the states have to have a defense mechanism when the federal government goes beyond its powers.
And yes, that includes the Supreme Court, which is not full of demigods, but rather human beings with the same passions and foibles as anyone else.
So going on from there, in the early 19th century, the very New England states that were critical of Virginia and Kentucky, all of a sudden in 1807, they start talking about nullification.
See, they were okay with the Sedition Act that made it a crime to throw you in jail for criticizing the President or Congress.
They were okay with that.
They couldn't believe Virginia and Kentucky thought that was unconstitutional.
They actually threw a Vermont congressman in jail for speaking out against John Adams.
This congressman got reelected from jail.
Gotta love Vermont.
It's wonderful.
But the New England states said, no, this embargo that you're imposing is unconstitutional, but also the way you're enforcing it.
Clearly, these are unconstitutional searches and seizures.
You can't just say, well, I have a funny feeling you might be up to no good, so I'm going to take your ship.
What the heck is this?
So this is the governor of Connecticut said, look, we are not cooperating with this in any way.
I urge all state employees to lend no assistance to the enforcement of this.
In fact, that's why I put at the end of the book...
Forfeiture.
Unconstitutional.
I can't imagine.
What foreign country are you talking about now?
Yeah, exactly.
This is the reason, by the way, that I put... half the book I put is primary sources.
Right.
I should have mentioned that, too.
And it's very valuable as well.
It's to show that I didn't just make this up.
It isn't just some daydream I'm having.
This is real American history.
So I've got that statement from the Connecticut governor.
I got statements from Wisconsin.
I got them from all over the country.
You notice there was no slavery in Wisconsin.
There's no slavery in Connecticut.
I got these things from all...
This is real American history.
And it's just gone.
Like, you would have a better chance of reading that I, Tom Woods and the King of England than you would to read any of this stuff in a typical American history textbook.
So they fought against it.
They fought against military conscription.
Daniel Webster and a couple of states actually said preemptively, we're going to nullify military conscription.
Daniel Webster said in 1814 that if you even consider doing this, which is clearly unconstitutional, then the states should interpose.
That's James Madison's word for the Virginia Resolution of 1798, should interpose to protect their people against this unconstitutional outrage.
But then finally, I know we're running low on time.
I know you wanted me to talk about the Fugitive Slave Laws.
A bunch of northern states tried to make the federal government's life difficult when it came to the Fugitive Slave Act.
But specifically, Wisconsin just was especially heroic, especially in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
And I won't hold us up here with explaining what the unconstitutional parts of that were, but there were a bunch of them, even though there is a Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution, unfortunately.
Well, all the same, Wisconsin came to the conclusion that regardless of the Fugitive Slave Clause, they still, as a state, had responsibility to protect their citizens from kidnapping.
In other words, you can't just come up here and say, oh, hey, there's my slave.
I'm going to go take him, which is what they were entitled to do.
Just go up and say, look, this is a description of him.
This guy kind of looks like that description.
I'm going to take him back with me.
Wisconsin said, oh, I don't think so.
We're going to give people jury trials here.
You can't just do that.
And so what wound up happening was this guy, there's a very interesting episode involving an alleged fugitive named Joshua Glover.
And I mention him because of the brouhaha that erupted.
When Glover was captured and put in a local jail until they could take him out and bring him back to his supposed owner, there were mass meetings held in the streets of Milwaukee.
They said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we've got to protect this guy.
We can't let them take him away.
We've got to get him a jury trial and take care of him, whatever.
And in fact, they got so worked up at these mass meetings that the whole mob of them ran into the jail and liberated Joshua Glover.
And he just ran away.
Well, the people who sort of were viewed as inciting the mob, there were two in particular viewed as inciting the mob, particularly Sherman Booth, an abolitionist newspaper man, were accused of violating the fugitive slave law, violating a federal law.
You're encouraging, you're inciting a mob to let this accused fugitive go.
You're not allowed to do that.
And yet for the next few years, the Supreme Court did everything they could.
And the U.S. attorney and everything else, they did everything they could to penalize this guy.
And yet the Wisconsin Supreme Court kept overruling it, refusing to hand him over.
They kept releasing him every time they'd put him in jail.
And then finally, in 1859, the Wisconsin legislature, in justifying what it and its Supreme Court had done, quoted Thomas Jefferson word for word from the Kentucky resolutions of 1798, 1799, saying, we are not bound to enforce an unconstitutional law.
Now, that is a very interesting part of American history, Scott.
But again, it is not part of the comic book version that we get from either left or right.
Well, and what you just said couldn't possibly be true.
If the state of Wisconsin's Supreme Court was set at defiance against the national Supreme Court, but whatever the national Supreme Court says is the Constitution, Tom, how could Wisconsin be right?
Exactly.
That was the innovation we got in the 20th century.
In the second half of the 20th century, we started getting that our decisions are the Constitution, which, again, no one would have accepted that.
Oh, I see a bunch of people we have no way to get rid of, in effect, could just sit there and tell us what the Constitution means.
This would have been considered insane by everybody.
I mean, Lincoln, remember, Lincoln said the state should just disregard the Dred Scott decision.
I mean, this is Lincoln, the iconic president, for heaven's sake.
So this is not some crazy theory that people came up with.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny that you would even have to say that because it's there's nothing crazy about it.
It makes sense to me.
Just common sense.
Yeah.
Well, like your example earlier about the internment as they like to euphemize it.
Is that a verb of the Japanese during World War Two?
The state of California should have said, hell no, put their guard on the border of Utah or whatever and said, you can't come in, feds.
Yeah, exactly.
And you know what, Scott, I got you know, I've already been smeared by one guy on the left that Lou Dubose and I wrote to him and said, look, Lou, what would you have done, you know, in the 1940s?
I mean, wouldn't you have cheered a state that nullified that order and said, no, we are protecting our people against kidnapping.
We're protecting them and you're not going to do it.
And he came back and said, no, no, no, no, no nullification is stupid and evil and slavery and segregation and blah, blah, blah.
He said, no, no, what we should have done is appealed to the Supreme Court precedent over here.
Oh, yeah, great.
You stand there holding your appeal to the Supreme Court precedent in your hand while meanwhile, the troops will march right by you and take those people out.
You've got to be kidding me.
That's the left answer.
You've got to be kidding me.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, how did that work out?
Because the Supreme Court, I guess, did find that the whole thing was unconstitutional long after the fact.
Right.
They might have done so long after the fact, but in the immediate run, the court found nothing wrong with it.
So there's another problem that they supposedly the court puts these things right.
Yeah.
People died in those camps.
People went to those prisons and never came out again.
People, you know, spent their early childhoods in those camps.
You know, people's lives were destroyed.
And look, I don't know if it would have worked to try a state nullification of that, but but obviously not doing it didn't work.
Right.
Why?
Yeah.
And boy, you brought up the example of the drug war, which is it's so funny the way it goes.
Kind of.
It's universally understood, but universally unacknowledged.
The destruction that this drug war policy is having on our entire society from top to bottom.
It's just the worst.
Right.
And it's a federal program.
It's not it's not Alabama doing this.
It's doing it at the dictates of the feds.
But we're supposed to think of the feds as our great and glorious progressive protector, and we can't think of it as something that we need to fight against.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Ron Paul was saying recently, well, the whole thing is going to start falling apart.
We're going to have de facto nullification anyway if we don't get the legal precedents in place.
And, yeah, I think we can look forward to that, although it might be tough times to make it that true.
But I guess that's what it takes sometimes.
Thanks so much for your work on this book and your time on the show today, Tom.
Thank you, Scott.
Everybody.
That's the great Thomas E. Woods, Tom Woods dot com nullification.
How to resist the feds.
