The Nullification Game

Yesterday's story about North Carolina Republicans signing onto a bill that would invoke the Tenth Amendment in order to establish a state religion was never about establishing a state religion, but all about nullification, specifically nullification of the country's first black President, and people concentrating on the theocracy angle are in part missing the bigger threat here.

If the logic that the Tenth Amendment trumps the Supremacy Clause holds true (despite a good 60 years of Supreme Court precedent that the greater good of the nation outweighs a state's right to simply ignore federal laws) then we no longer have a United States of America, but a disunited country.  We've fought wars over this concept, guys.  Some 150 years after states went to war against each other over this, the Republican party is increasingly moving toward this poisonous position once again.

"Washington can't tell us what to do" has become "We won't enforce their laws" in turn becoming "We no longer recognize the laws we don't like" and is going towards "We'll fight like hell to be free of you."  Texas grumbling about secession, North Dakota passing clearly unconstitutional abortion restrictions and daring Washington to do something about it, now we have North Carolina challenging the Bill of Rights and making a huge court fight out of it.

There's no real downside to constantly overloading the courts with these battles, because all it takes is one win to open the door, and then chaos reigns.  There's four votes to have the Tenth Amendment be the predominant tenet of the law, nullifying the federal, on the Supreme Court.  These are the same jokers that came within a whisker of overturning Obamacare completely on these same grounds, and whom believe that corporations are entities with free speech rights that can only be expressed by being able to use unlimited funds to buy our election system.

So no, I don't put nullification past them.  This is all part of the ALEC playbook anyway: relentlessly challenge anything remotely liberal in court until it either becomes unenforceable or is overturned.  So far it's working out rather well for them, only being stopped by a thin margin of occasional capricious wisdom on the part of Justice Kennedy and the ego of Chief Justice Roberts not wanting to go down in legal history as the biggest goat ever.

That ain't much to rest a country on.

[UPDATE]  Looks like the national public outcry was so massive that North Carolina's state House Speaker, Republican Thom Tillis is promising that he will not bring the bill up for a vote:

A House resolution supporting the creation of an official religion in North Carolina will never come to a vote, officials said Thursday.

House Speaker Thom Tillis' office said House Joint Resolution 494 was dead.

So, looks like we won this round.  The next, well...