Jeff Sessions Is All Wet

Can political arrangements be dissolved peacefully? Legally? At the ballot box? By referendum? Or by any other mechanism short of outright violence and civil war?

According to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the answer to these questions is no. Speaking in California yesterday on the subject of immigration and sanctuary cities, he issued this remarkable statement that manages to upend the entire concept of federalism in just a few short sentences:

There is no nullification. There is no secession. Federal law is the supreme law of the land. I would invite any doubters to go to Gettysburg, or to the tombstones of John C. Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln. This matter has been settled.

In Sessions’s mind, polities are forever, set in stone. The Constitution established a permanent and supreme federal state — a view totally at odds with that much better document, the Declaration of Independence. The 50 states exist as nothing more than glorified federal counties, able to exert jurisdiction only in those areas not preempted by superior federal law.

And the cheap shutdown tactic of announcing a supposed legal precedent as “settled” is countered simply by pointing out how unsettled the American public really is, on issues from guns to immigration to abortion to Trump.

Constitutional jurisprudence, awful as it is, is hardly settled. It exists in a state of constant flux. As does history itself. Wasn’t English colonial rule “settled law” in 1700?

If only we could arrive at “settled liberties.”

Ludwig von Mises, unlike Attorney General Sessions, was a forceful and determined advocate of self-determination. Having witnessed firsthand the collapse of a far-flung Habsburg Empire, Mises was proudly Viennese in outlook after the horrors of…

Read more