"Just say no" leads to "just nullify."

Funny, how, when a batshit-crazy political idea comes up, it always seems to lead back to South Carolina:

The old states' rights argument, if successful, could upend years of federal legislation. Will we have a system where states can pick and choose among federal laws? We want our elderly to get Medicare, and give us more highway money, but forget this health-care expansion.

That sounds like the logic of the nullifiers of the 1830s, fighting to resist a federal tariff they thought was too high. South Carolina Gov. Robert Y. Hayne, their leader, sounded rather like today's "tea partyers." His state, he declared in 1832, was "inflexibly determined never to surrender her reserved rights, nor to suffer the constitutional compact to be converted into an instrument for the oppression of her citizens."

 

Andrew Jackson's response to the nullifiers is classic. He denounced "the strange position that any one State may not only declare an act of Congress void, but prohibit its execution." He also wondered how a state could "retain its place in the Union, and yet be bound by no other of its laws than those it may choose to consider as constitutional."