Nullification: a relevant issue?

There is at least one major candidate this depressing election year who might cause one to wonder, what were they thinking?

No, not Linda McMahon. We know what the Republican Party was thinking when it nominated McMahon — her $50 million. Martha Dean is the candidate I have in mind, and she makes Linda look like Daniel Webster.

Dean is the Republican candidate for attorney general and is running primarily as the anti-Blumenthal, promising to stop picking on businesses and forcing them to flee the state to escape the wrath of a vengeful and litigious attorney general.

Among the evils promulgated by Blumenthal, says Dean, was the suit against the tobacco industry, when Connecticut joined other states in suing the industry for killing its customers. The states won a settlement of $246 billion, with Connecticut getting $3.6 billion, an amount eerily similar to the current deficit.

But Dean pledges to end “the inappropriate use of the AG’s office to raise revenue,� which is “the exclusive province of the Legislature.�

Now, reasonable voters can differ on the appropriateness of the state getting $3.6 billion out of the tobacco industry, but Dean has some other ideas that appear even stranger. There’s her support for nullification, a legal doctrine out of favor for 150 years, except in the segregationist South and in exotic right-wing circles today.

For those of you who haven’t given the matter much thought since the Buchanan administration, nullification would allow a state to reject a law it dislikes without the inconvenience of going to court.

Nullification has respectable antecedents. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison argued that the states could “interpose� their objections to the oppressive Alien and Sedition Laws at the start of the 19th century, but when South Carolina later sought to nullify a tariff law by refusing to collect tariffs on imported goods, President Andrew Jackson sent the Navy to Charleston to do the collecting for the state.

By the middle of the century, John C. Calhoun and his southern colleagues in Congress were taking nullification to its extreme by threatening secession to nullify federal actions against the extension of slavery. That matter was settled in 1865.

But not for Martha Dean. Nullification remains “one of several tools that could be used to rein in the federal government� and “the last resort to keep the federal government within its constitutional bounds.�

Dean also disagrees that secession was settled in the Civil War. “Do the states have the legal right� to secede? she asks. “Absolutely. Should they use it? Absolutely not.�

So, we can at least be thankful that whether she or Democrat George Jepsen succeeds Blumenthal, we will not be rushing headlong into secession.

But nullification and secession aren’t Dean’s only quirks. Her fervent devotion to guns is another. In fact, the gun, not nullification, is Dean’s real last resort to keep government within its constitutional bounds. She fears the potential exists for government to turn against its citizens and citizens therefore need to be able to defend themselves with an armed response. After all, King George III did it; a president could, too.

And so, “as your attorney general, I will advocate firearms training in schools, in Scouts, in camps and elsewhere,� said candidate Dean at a gun lovers’ rally immortalized in a Jepsen ad.

Makes you wonder where “elsewhere� might be located and hope it’s not a day-care center.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury.

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