Journal articles on the topic 'Nullification (States' rights)'

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) that gutted a key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened the door for a dramatic surge in laws restricting access to the right to vote that particularly targeted racial minorities. These new laws were enacted in states controlled by Republican-dominated legislatures and Republican governors, and overwhelmingly in jurisdictions formerly subject to the preclearance under the VRA. In the wake of the “Big Lie” following the 2020 presidential election, many of these same states “doubled down” on new voter suppression measures and enacted new laws that make it easier to subvert election results. I argue that the recent wave of attacks on the voting rights of racial minorities is an example of the doctrine of nullification—the tendency to allow legislation and constitutional amendments designed to protect the rights of African Americans to remain technically the law of the land while divesting them of their enforcement powers. Utilizing principles derived from the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833, I argue that the doctrine of nullification provides a useful framework with which to analyze the history of attacks on the voting rights of African Americans and other racial minorities—both during the Reconstruction period and in the current era.

Abstract: This article corrects major historiographical flaws concerning Louisiana's early relationship with the United States and argues the federal tariff was the most critical factor influencing state reconciliation. Leading Louisiana historians like Peter Kastor concur that slavery inspired French-speaking Creole planters to embrace U.S. citizenship. Their consensus further holds that Creole commitment to slavery crystalized their national cultural acceptance. However, Creole planters shared far more with Caribbean slaveholders than those in the American South. Throughout Louisiana's early territorial and statehood years, slavery bolstered animosity between Anglo-Americans and Creoles. The former viewed Creoles through a racist lens and remained wary of their slave-related cultural practices, like openly acknowledging mixed-race relationships. The latter feared that English-speaking migrants would undermine their legal hegemony and inspire insurrection. Though slavery impeded Louisiana unity, the federal tariff did more than anything else to foster it. Throughout the 1820s, Creole planters became reliant on federal sugar protections to alleviate competition. Thus, the tariff gave Creoles a considerable incentive to embrace national political identities. Louisiana's redoubtable statesman Edward Livingston was particularly instrumental in promoting reconciliation on both sides. Before becoming Andrew Jackson's Secretary of State, the exiled New Yorker spent decades representing his adopted state's culturally divergent Creoles. When South Carolina triggered the Nullification Crisis in 1832-1833, Livingston spoke with Louisiana's unique perspective and eloquently guided Jackson's response which deftly balanced federalism's necessities with states' rights concerns. Thus, through the tariff, Louisiana not only embraced its new American identity, but the government employed Louisiana's voice to preserve the Union.

John Caldwell Calhoun was an American statesman and political theorist from South Carolina who defended the interest of the Union southern states. Calhoun was one of staunch spokesmen of slavery, but in this article the author presents his constitutional and political thought. After the introduction of the Tariff of Abominations Calhoun became one of the most important actors in the nullification crisis and a defender of states’ rights, limited federal government and the right to nullify. Referring to the ideas of the Founding Fathers, Calhoun considered the Union as a union of sovereign states and he opposed the strengthening of the federal government. He rejected numerical democracy and advocated the introduction of a constitutional reform protecting minority from the tyranny of majority. He proposed the concept of a concurent majority, which took into account various interests and, consequently, defended the agricultural South from the industrial domination of the North. His reflections and warnings heavily influenced the South’s secession and the outbreak of the Civil War.

Before the outbreak of the Civil War, the theorists and politicians of the South of the US developed the theoretical instruments of resistance to what they considered tyrannical practices of the federal government. Just next to interposition and nullification, the most radical measure was the right of secession. In the article, the author distinguishes between constitutional and meta-legal arguments. The first ones refer to the thought of the Founding Fathers, the spirit of ‘98 and the concept of states’ rights. Its main elements are: the contractual nature of the Union, the original sovereignty of the states and the interpretation of the phrase: “We the People” used in the Constitution. In turn the philosophical justification refers to the right of resistance to tyrannical government contained in the Declaration of Independence. The two group of justifications appeared together, and the author searches for them in the acts of secession of South Carolina and the CS Constitution

AbstractThis essay contends that we can better understand Andrew Jackson's distinctive account of federalism by looking outside the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian political traditions. More appropriate peers for Jackson, as a constitutional statesman, are John Marshall and Abraham Lincoln. Existing treatments of Jackson miss these connections because they focus primarily on his roles as party leader and reformer, to the neglect of his constitutional statesmanship. A major cause of this neglect is the apparent inconsistency between Jackson's “nationalist” account of the Union in the Nullification Proclamation and his advocacy of “states' rights” elsewhere, a tension that can be resolved by a closer reading of Jackson's rhetoric. Among other things, this redefinition of Jackson's legacy demonstrates that there is no necessary tension between a strong union and meaningful limits on federal power; nor is there a necessary affinity between narrow construction of federal power and state-compact theory.

Since a majority of Supreme Court justices created the abortion right in 1973, a troubling pattern has emerged: The Supreme Court has come to ignore—and even nullify—longstanding precedent and legal doctrines in the name of preserving and expanding the abortion right. And with a Supreme Court majority that is blithe to manipulate any doctrine or principle—no matter how deeply rooted in U.S. legal tradition—in the name of expansive abortion rights, it should come as no surprise that lower courts are following suit. Most recently, the D.C. Circuit fired up the “ad hoc nullification machine,” but this time, its victim of choice was the constitutional distinction between citizenship and alien status. In Garza v. Hargan, the D.C. Circuit—sitting en banc—pronounced, for the first time, that the Constitution guarantees the right to an abortion on demand to unlawfully present aliens. The Supreme Court has long held, however, that the scope of constitutional rights accorded to unlawful aliens is limited. Rather than confront this inconvenient precedent, the D.C. Circuit entirely ignored the antecedent question of whether unlawfully present aliens are entitled to the Fifth Amendment abortion right. Instead, the court simply assumed that they are. This holding is wrong for two reasons. First, by effectively deciding that an unlawful immigrant minor, in federal custody, whose only contact with the United States was her detention at the U.S. border, was entitled to the full scope of Fifth Amendment rights, the D.C. Circuit ignored Supreme Court precedent mandating that a person must have “developed substantial connections with the country” before being accorded constitutional protections. Second, by carving out this special exception for the abortion right, the court prioritized that right over all other constitutional protections.

The article examines the essence of lustration as a political and legal mechanism for the protection of democracy. It was revealed that this phenomenon has been known to world his­tory since ancient times, but it received a modern meaning after the Second World War, when a number of European countries were in a state of overcoming the consequences of anti-dem­ocratic fascist and Nazi regimes. The complex political and legal nature of the concept of «lustration» is revealed, which is manifested in the need to find a balance between the protec­ tion of the principles of young democracy and the protection of human rights. The world ex­perience of conducting lustration and the most frequent mistakes made by states in this aspect are analyzed. International bodies and organizations, such as the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission) and the European Court of Human Rights, play an important role in the mechanism of determining the criteria and principles of lustration. It is the established practice of these institutions that allows us to conclude that lustration in itself is not a violation of human rights, but acts as an effective mechanism for cleansing power from representatives of past anti-democratic regimes. Historical experience shows that only those states that passed through lustration and decommunization mechanisms got a chance to build truly democratic right-wing regimes. Ukraine, on the contrary, is a vivid example of a state that did not carry out appropriate proce­dures immediately after the overthrow of the communist regime, therefore, after almost several dozen years, it faced the same problems in a significantly larger volume. Also, the domestic experience of conducting lustration proved how ineffective the relevant mechanisms can be when the legislator does not take into account international standards in this field and the hast­ily adopted legislation contains a number of shortcomings, which include: lack of an individualized approach to responsibility, too wide a list of persons to whom it was distributed Law of Ukraine «On Purification of Power», lack of effective protection mechanisms, etc. As a result, such deficiencies in the legislation led to the recognition of unlawful state interference in the rights of persons to whom lustration was applied and the nullification of relevant efforts.

The article deals with determination of the problem aspects of juridical possibility (admissibility) or impossibility (inadmissibility) of protection of property right to real estate in case of refusal of registration subject (particularly state registrar) to provide the state registration of such a right within juridical mechanism of the original right-acquisition. The author highlights the essence of right-establishing and right-proving conceptions of state registration in sphere of real estate civil circulation. The legal opinions formulated in the judgment of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine of November 16, 2022 in case No 3-270/2019(6302/19) are analyzed. It is concluded that taking into account the subject-matter of the case had been listened by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine the conclusions made by the court deals mostly with the juridical consequences of nullification of right registration decision particularly in aspect of interference with the right, concepts of legal certainty and a fair balance. It is stated that the conclusions made by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine characterizes the conceptual limitation of protective possibilities of participants of real estate civil circulation. On the one hand the probability of taking away the power of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine and its territorial bodies to nullify (to abolish) the state registrar decisions relates to cancelation of the legal mechanisms of administrative protection of rights to real estate including the property right in case of refusal of registration subject (particularly state registrar) to provide the state registration of such a right within juridical mechanism of the original right-acquisition. At the same time on the other hand the conclusions made by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine do not solve finally the problem of possibility or impossibility of protection of property right to real estate in case of refusal of registration subject (particularly state registrar) to provide the state registration of such a right within juridical mechanism of the original right-acquisition. Key words: protection of the rights, real estate, refusal of rights registration, nullification of right registration decision.

La Participación ciudadana, es definida por el derecho y la responsabilidad de la ciudadanía en un territorio determinado, con incidencia en el espacio público. Es la realización del acto material de acudir a sufragar por alguna de las opciones planteadas e incluso para determinar “votar en blanco” o “anular el sufragio”. Además, en momentos no electorales, al participar se busca incidir en las decisiones de gobierno, en las distintas etapas de políticas públicas, o en el diseño de alguna ley o normatividad, para mejorar las condiciones de vida de quienes integran una Entidad Federativa, un barrio o una colonia, sin que ello implique la búsqueda de un beneficio personal o un ascenso político. El participar es una acción influida por la cultura de la política, y por procesos de socialización. En este artículo se presenta una forma cuantitativa para estudiarla, tomando como ejemplo, la jornada electiva federal del 2012 en la Delegación Miguel Hidalgo. Citizen’s participation, is defined by the right and responsibilities to citizens in a determined region with impact within the public space. It is the realization of the material act of presence for one of the given political options, and also to determine a blank vote or nullification. In non-campaigning moments, you also participate in government decisions in different stages of public politics, or in the design of a bill or a new way of norm for the betterment the conditions of the lives of those who have a voting identification, a neighborhood or areas without searching for a personal benefit or political raise. Participation is an action influenced by the politic of the culture and by processes of socialization. In this paper, a form to study, is presented taking as example the political campaign of 2012 in Miguel Hidalgo.

A comprehensive understanding of the housing situation in California specifically, and the United States generally, cannot be addressed without close examination of the material conditions of the poor and how the actions of public servants charged with implementing and delivering housing regulations and policy affect them and the law. This research focuses on everyday interactions between street-level bureaucrats and homeless residents to examine how and why discretion—the legal authority of government officials to enforce the law—is exercised. This paper argues that factors involved in triggering enforcement and criminalization are highly influenced by local political dynamics which are shown to play a role in the discretionary decision-making process of those on the frontlines of homelessness in Orange County, California, and ultimately nullifying important precedent aimed at protecting the constitutional rights of the unhoused.

“I’m saying let’s make it 84 percent turnout in two years, and then see what happens!” …“Oh, yes! Vote! Dress yourself up, and vote! Even if you only go into the voting booth and pray. Do that!” Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toni Morrison on the 2000 Presidential election in June Jordan’s essay, “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage” (2001) On September 17, 2003, Citizenship Day, the United States was to adopt a new version of its Oath of Allegiance. The updated version would modernize the oath by removing cumbersome words like “abjure” and dropping anachronistic references like “potentate.” Thus the oral recitation marking the entrance into citizenship would become more meaningful—and more manageable—for the millions of immigrants eligible for naturalization. The revised version, however, was quickly canned after conservative organizations, senators, and other loud political leaders decried what they saw as an attack on a timeless document and a weakening of the military obligation foundational to entrance into the American citizenry. The Heritage Foundation, one such organization opposing the perceived attack on citizenship, issued an executive statement decrying “the Department of Homeland Security's misguided attempts to make U.S. citizenship more ‘user-friendly’ for those who want the benefits of our country, but don't care to accept the responsibility” (n.pag.). Indeed, the thwarted attempt to make citizenship procedures more welcoming arose at a curious time. Though the proposed changes arose from a long, rather mundane administrative initiative to reconsider various procedural issues, the debate over the Oath of Allegiance politicized the issue within the context of the war on terror and the constriction of entrances into the national turf. The Bush administration responded to events referred to as 9/11 with vigorous efforts to shore up national borders within a language of terrorism, evildoers, and the dire need for domestic security. The infamous Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) became the consumerist, welcome-sounding Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services when it was placed it under the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. The consolidation of citizenship services and disparate border policing programs further bolsters the longstanding scrutiny of immigrants—especially those considered not-white—for their ideological commitment and adherence to current national ideals. Naturalization requires a uniform recitation of unhesitant adherence to official doctrines—and a stated commitment to fight and die for those ideals. War, it seems, and its necessary division of friends and foes (“evildoers”), occupies the dead center of official ceremonies of citizenship. Naturalization procedures demonstrate how the figure of the immigrant undergoes rigorous scrutiny and thus defines the bounds of American citizenship. However, as immigration scholars like Bonnie Honig, Mai Ngai, Linda Bosniak, and Judith Shklar have shown, the specter of the immigrant also serves as an exculpatory device for preexisting inequities by obscuring internal division. While immigrants perform allegiance publicly to obtain citizenship status, birth-right citizens are presumed to have been born with a natural allegiance that precludes multiple allegiances to ideologies, projects, or potentates outside national borders. Ideas about the necessity of pairing exclusive ideological commitment with citizenship are as old as the American nation, notwithstanding the tremendous volume of announcements of a new world order in the wake of 9/11. In all incarnations of the citizenship oath, full membership in the nation-state via naturalization requires a simultaneous oath of allegiance and renunciation. Entrance into the nation-state requires exit—from ideological turf more than geographic turf—from the newly naturalized citizen’s former home country. Though scholars of diasporic and cosmopolitan identities like Aihwa Ong, Phengh Cheah, Bruce Robbins, and Brent Edwards have questioned the viability of the nation-state in postmodernity, official American articulations of citizenship adhere to a longstanding phenomenon whereby inclusion within the polity requires a simultaneous exclusion or renunciation. Or, in the realm of rhetoric, any articulation of a “we” requires a simultaneous citation of a “not-we.” At the heart of citizenship is a cleavage: a coming together made possible by a splitting apart. It is not mere historical curiosity that the notorious utterance of “We” in the Action of the Second Continental Congress popularly known as the Declaration of Independence is forged in direct opposition to a “He” (King George III)—repeated no less than nineteen times in the short document. In contrast, “we” appears only eleven times. What the Declaration shows, and what the Oath of Allegiance insists, is that the constitution of a bounded polity in America emphasizes external difference in order to create the semblance of an internally homogeneous “we.” Thus arises the potency of national documents that announce equality amidst a decidedly unequal social order. These documents provide the ring of broad inclusion for what Rogers M. Smith has described as “civic myths”: ideals of full equality that politicians cite enthusiastically without worrying about their veracity in the everyday lives of the citizenry. Yet American archives and literary histories teem with protest writing that makes visible the internal divisions of American publics. In these literatures arises a figure that threatens the fragile story of a finished “we” based on uniform allegiance: the partial citizen speaking. The partial citizen speaking—from experience, on behalf of others—and addressing the real divisions within a national audience is situated at a strategic site at which to simultaneously claim and critique the inclusive pronouncements of the American Republic in order to make them real. The best example is Frederick Douglass who, having been invited to celebrate the nation in 1848, capitalized on his tenuous claim to citizenship status and delivered the speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In the speech, Douglass excoriates his audience in Rochester, New York on behalf of the slaves absent from Corinthian Hall because they are toiling on Southern plantations. To his “fellow-citizens” Douglass cries, “This Fourth of July is yours not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (116). In contradistinction to leaders’ duplicitous uses of civic myths eschewed by Smith, protesters like Douglass use their partial citizenship to gain a toehold on the viable, but unfinished project of full democracy for all. By claiming the essential American-ness of their projects, protesters like Douglass position their present projects as the fulfillment of previous national promises. In her study of foreigners’ critiques of America, Bonnie Honig shows how “[Foreigners] make room for themselves by staging nonexistent rights, and by way of such stagings, sometimes, new rights, powers, and visions come into being” (101). In the wake of 9/11, we must be interested in the rhetorical means of similar stagings by those already inside presumed national borders who have been denied full access to, or enjoyment of civic, economic, and/or social rights. These partial citizens speaking and writing stage heretofore nonexistent rights by claiming preexisting civic myths by, for, and on behalf of voices that were never meant to speak such civic myths as truths. Sometime after 9/11, President George W. Bush took the virtually unprecedented step of labeling U.S. citizens like Yasir Hamdi and José Padilla “enemy combatants” in order to circumvent the guaranteed legal rights to counsel and trial afforded to all U.S. citizens. The arbitrary nullification of Hamdi’s and Padilla’s citizenship rights was not entirely new given that protest has often been seen as forfeiture of citizenship. In addition to the obvious example of the allegiance-renunciation pairing in the citizenship oath, we can turn to Emma Goldman’s deportation to Russia in 1919, or to the odd favor with which the exit plans of Garveyites and their predecessors have been received. Or, squarely within American borders, Henry David Thoreau’s blueprint of civil disobedience pairs protest with the withdrawal from collectivity (his refusal to pay poll taxes in protest of the Mexican War), a move which bolsters the notion that dissent necessitates a retraction from participation in the public sphere. However, there is another option: collectivity in the face of division. Protesters like Douglass occupy the outposts of real publics that can deliver the ineffable social equality of the modern democratic state. Here, those whose very citizenship is in question are the ones to sift through the promises of the nation-state and to hold them against the evidence of experience—their own and that of others for whom they speak. Participation in the state is more than adherence and renunciation. If Toni Morrison would just as soon have us enter a polling station to pray as to vote; so, too, protesters like Douglass demand hope amidst despairing situations of inequality—often state-sponsored. Their projects are never to simply unveil inconsistency between state promises and the experiences of subsets of its citizenry. Squarely within the circuitous myths that enshroud the state’s turf, these protesters stake claims to the very national myths that threaten their existence. Works Cited Bosniak, Linda. “Citizenship.” The Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies. Eds. Peter Can & MarkTushnet. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 183-201. Cheah, Phengh, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Douglass, Frederick. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” 1848. Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 108-30. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Govindarajan, Shweta. “Criticism Puts Citizenship Oath Revision on Hold; Conservatives Pan Immigration Officials’ Modernization of the Long-Used Pledge.” Los Angeles Times 19 Sep. 2003, sect. 1:13. The Heritage Foundation. First They Attacked the Pledge, Now the Oath. 10 Sep. 2003. <http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/meeseletter.cfm>. Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Jordan, June. “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage.” Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan. New York: Basic Books, 2001. 16-19. Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship and the Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Websites Department of Homeland Security: www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Norman, Brian J. "Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/04-allegiance.php>. APA Style Norman, B. (2004, Mar17). Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/04-allegiance.php>