Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Sanctuary, when practiced by Governors rather than churches, is nullification, a common practice infamously deployed by the Southern states during and after the Civil War. Henry David Thoreau, author of “ Slavery in Massachusetts ,” was what might be called a-party-of-one nullifier. Thoreau famously refused to pay a tax that might have been traced, even indirectly, to the purchase of a bullet used by slave owners to recover the “property” they had lost after the infamous Fugitive Slave Act had been passed. That law lit the bonfire of resistance among abolitionists in Massachusetts. Thoreau no doubt would have encouraged those in his audience who heard his address – for reasons unknown, seldom circulated in schools – to do the same, but the monk of Walden Pond knew the limits of audacity. Refusing to pay a tax, he went to jail himself, as ever a party of one.

Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell has noticed that liberals in Connecticut quietly have embarked on a course of nullification. The issue of nullification arose nationally when “crazy conservatives,” Mr. Powell noted in a recent column , attempted to enact legislation “to prevent enforcement of the new federal medical insurance law, reviving state's rights in the name of ‘nullification’ of federal statutes.” Here in Connecticut, the log of nullification begins to weigh heavily in the eyes of some over-excitable liberals who, during an attorney general’s race, accused Mrs. Martha Dean of promoting the antiquated doctrine. Yours truly wrote about the issue when it was raised at the time: “And when Mrs. Dean mentioned nullification in a historical context, it was roundly hinted by some commentators that nullification might lead -- gasp! -- to a new civil war. In pre-Civil War New England, the fires of nullification began to smolder over the Fugitive Slave Act....