Ed Martin is attaching his candidacy for the U.S. to the discredited notion that states can ignore the U.S. Constitution by nullifying federal laws. In a rambling open letter to the Missouri General Assembly, posted at the "Tenth Amendment Center":
I will support you in any effort to nullify or interpose any law, regulation, or other action that we deem to be an overreach of federal constitutional authority.
This may sound nice to the Tenther crowd, but we have an entire third branch of government for sorting out what is constitutional and what isn't constitutional. States -- and Ed Martin's friends -- don't get to pick and choose which acts of Congress apply to them. And speaking of the Constitution:
Article 6 of the Constitution clearly states that Acts of Congress “shall be the supreme law of the land…anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” That’s why one of our founding fathers, James Madison, argued that nullification would “speedily put an end to the Union itself” by allowing federal laws to be freely ignored by states.
ThinkProgress legal expert Ian Millhiser noted that nullification isn’t just blatantly unconstitutional, it’s "nothing less than a plan to remove the word ‘United’ from the United States of America."
