Welcome back to the Brian Kilmead show. I'm Mary Walter in for Brian Kilmead.

Joining us now, Rich Lowry, he's the editor of National Review. You can find him on exit. Rich Lowry, that's super easy.

Rich, welcome to the Brian Kilmead Show. How are you?

Good. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Super interesting piece that she wrote, and I learned, I'm a history buff. So I learned from this. And it's entitled, if you want to check it out, National Review, Tim Walts, Ice, and Thomas Jefferson's very worst idea. And it's something called the Kentucky Resolutions. And they also did something the same in Virginia.

Just, I've never, like I said, I'm a history buff, never heard of the Kentucky resolutions.

Could just tell people what the Kentucky resolutions were?

Yeah, sure.

So this is 1790s.

We think things are divided now.

But they were as divided and more divided right at the beginning of the

Republic. Jefferson and Adams, they hated each other. John Adams and the Federalist

passed something called the Constitution Act, which the Jefferson side considered repressive

and unconstitutional. So Jefferson allied with James Madison at the time, they get together

and like, what can we do?

How can states resist this?

So Jefferson drafts what becomes the Kentucky resolutions, Madison drafts, what becomes the Virginia

resolution, and what Jefferson posits that basically states can just nullify federal laws

if they don't like.

And this is a very bad idea.

Even at the time, people are saying,

no, this isn't how it works. And over time, this idea has been totally discredited. You had a secession crisis in 1830 that Andrew Jackson put down. We got the civil war, get the Supreme Court

for decades and decades saying there's a supremacy clause in the Constitution when there's a

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