Strictures on NullificationEverett, Alexander Hill
History
Strictures on Nullification
Everett, Alexander Hill
Nullification (States' rights)
3. In the same way, _any one State_ has a right to put its own
construction upon the Constitution, by which the States create the
General Government their common agent, and to disavow and annul any acts
done by the General Government upon a mistaken construction of these
powers, while the General Government, on its part, has no right to
enforce its own construction of the Constitution against that of its
principal.
The correctness of this reasoning, says the Vice-President, in its
application 'to the ordinary transactions of life, no one will doubt,
_nor can it be possible to assign a reason, why it is not as applicable
to the case of a Government as to that of individuals_.' Not
anticipating the nature of the objections that may be made to his
reasoning, the Vice-President of course does not attempt to refute them,
nor does he think it necessary to illustrate, explain or enforce his own
theory, but, under the comfortable assurance that in its application to
the ordinary transactions of life _no one will doubt it_, and that it
_cannot be possible_ to assign a reason why it should not be applied in
the case of Governments, he jumps at once to his conclusion, that it is
and ought to be applicable to that of the United States. Now it is
obvious to us, that this reasoning, far from commanding the universal
assent which the Vice-President seems to expect for it, will be
considered by most intelligent and unprejudiced readers as open to
various weighty and decisive objections. Admitting that the General
Government may, in a certain sense of the term, be properly described as
the agent of the States, the other proposition, that a principal has an
unlimited right to construe the powers and disavow the acts of his agent
is, even in private affairs, far from being equally clear; and were this
even true in private affairs, it would by no means follow that _any one
State_ has an equally good right to annul at discretion the acts of the
General Government. We shall enlarge a little upon each of these points.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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