Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast introduction to this week's program with

Dr Lindsay Chervinsky, ten things about the doctrine of nullification.

That's when a state refuses to accept a law passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by the President.

This doesn't happen very often, but it is an important part of resistance to the national government.

Under the Articles of Confederation, the states were sovereign.

It was a loose collection of confederated states.

Under the Constitution, the states are subordinate,

but they don't lose all of their sovereignty and that's where the mischief sort

of begins.

And this all began really with Thomas Jefferson who in 1798 appalled by the Alien and Sedition Acts, which he thought were worthy of the

ninth or tenth century.

He wrote secret resolutions for Kentucky, which threatened to nullify that set of federal laws.

Madison talked him a little bit down from the more extreme language,

but still the Kentucky resolutions are more strident,

let's say, than the Virginia Virginia resolutions which were penned by James

Madison himself.

They both expected that the rest of the country would rally to their side about this but they

didn't.

Most of the country was appalled by the

nullification threats and secession threats of Jefferson, although it took a long

time for people to realize that he was the author of the set that went to Kentucky.

Today there are secessionist movements around the country.

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