Ever since 1865 discussions of constitutionalism have assumed that the supreme court justices should be viewed as black-robed deities with a monopoly on constitutional interpretation. That is the nationalist view of constitutionalism championed by Hamilton, Marshall, Story, Webster, Lincoln, and all of their political descendants. In his book on the Constitution, written while he was still a Princeton professor, Woodrow Wilson celebrated the fact that the “Civil War” finally forced (literally at gunpoint) this statist superstition on the entire nation. The opposing Jeffersonian position was that if the day ever came when five government lawyer/political hacks with lifetime tenure were given monopolistic power to decide what everyone’s liberties will be, then Americans will then be living in tyranny. That day arrived in April of 1865. (The best book ever written on the Jeffersonian interpretation of the Constitution is A View of the Constitution of the United States by St. George Tucker, who was Thomas Jefferson’s law professor at the College of William and Mary).
The Washington establishment and its media stooges have recently thrown another one of their hate-fits over President Trump’s replacement for Jeff “Mr. Magoo” Sessions as (acting) U.S. Attorney General because the man (Matt Whitaker) has a history of speaking favorably about nullification, the principle enunciated by Thomas Jefferson in the Kentucky Resolve of 1798. In the famous Resolve Jefferson reminded the nation that when it comes to constitutional interpretation there are three branches of government, not just one. Thirty-four years later Andrew Jackson would reiterate this truth in his veto of the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. “The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution,” said Jackson while declaring that he disagreed with the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the bank, and his opinion was just as valid as the Court’s.
In addition, the Tenth Amendment gives the people of the free and independent states an equal say as well and they are not obligated, said the great man, to unlimited obedience to the central government. Cementing in place unlimited obedience to the central government has been the primary job of the Supreme Court ever since 1865. That of course was the whole purpose of the War to Prevent Southern Independence from the perspective of the Northern states.
