What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
- Having said all that, Jackson wants to tell South Carolina what he thinks about their "nullification."
- It's his duty as president duty to warn them of the consequences of this ill-considered action.
- In a sentence that goes on forever, he lets them know that they're subverting the Constitution, threatening to destroy a prosperous and honored nation, sit on the graves of the fathers who spilled blood creating the nation, and destroying the most glorious nation the world has ever seen.
- Jackson says it's his duty as president to preserve the Union.
- He tells the Nullies that he could crush them like little irritating bugs. But hey, he's a civil guy, so he will try doing the diplomatic thing and talk this through and try to reason with them.
- He doesn't think this issue is really about the tariff at all. It's about states trying to pretend they're not part of a Union.
- First, he wants them to know that they can't just get rid of a law just because they disagree with it.
- If they decide to nullify one law, what's to keep them from nullifying others?
- When states joined the Union, the agreement was to abide by the law of the land. That goes for the courts, too.
- And what if every state just challenged every law they didn't like and declared that the feds couldn't appeal to the courts.
- The whole country would fall apart. That's what.
- If these kinds of shenanigans had happened at an earlier time, the Union wouldn't have made it out of its infancy.
- Other states have disagreed with laws in the past, but they were all grown up enough to know they didn't have the right to nullify them.
- What if states had nullified the acts that led to the war for independence? Even though the war inflicted hardship on the states, they stuck by the Union.
- Jackson provides a quick history lesson about the U.S. declared itself to be nation. From the get-go, the states agreed to abide by the laws of the Articles of Confederation.
- But the Confederation had no power to enforce this; that was its major defect. The new nation needed something more.
- Enter the new and improved version: the Constitution.
- The Constitution was created for a reason.
- What's in the first sentence? "To form a perfect Union." Could it be any clearer?
- Does that sound like a nation where each state can do exactly as it wants? Any idiot could see that it does not.
- The indisputable conclusion is that the power for a state to annul a law is incompatible with the idea of a Union. Plus, it's explicitly contradicted by the Constitution and violates just about all its principles. It's a Union-destroyer.
- Q.E.D.