Bill Tallen

A trend is gaining force that does not bode well for America. It’s the self-styled “resistance” to the Trump administration and anything it does or says, which is leading us to the edge of a precipice. In particular, it’s the active resistance of state and local governments to the work of ICE, the Border Patrol, and cooperating agencies enforcing federal immigration law.

Disagreement over the policy is protected against government censure and censorship by the First Amendment. Write, speak, scream or protest as you will — within the law. You could even legitimately take the next step, break the law in a nonviolent fashion, and accept the legal penalty for doing so. This is known as civil disobedience, which Brittanica defines as: “… the refusal to obey the demands or commands of a government or occupying power, without resorting to violence or active measures of opposition … acts associated with civil disobedience are considered crimes, however, and known by actor and public alike to be punishable ... By submitting to punishment, the civil disobedient hopes to set a moral example that will provoke the majority or the government into effecting meaningful political, social, or economic change. Under the imperative of setting a moral example, leaders of civil disobedience insist that the illegal actions be nonviolent.”

Of course, civil disobedience has only been effective where governments exercise restraint and recognize a right of peaceful protest, like the United States during the civil rights movement, and the United Kingdom in India in the early 20th Century. Gandhi, whose “satyagraha” campaign against British colonial rule there only survived and prevailed because the British did not respond with the violence it was capable of. Had the colonial power been the USSR or Nazi Germany, for instance, Gandhi’s movement would have been bloodily suppressed; something so obviously true that nothing of the sort was ever attempted against those tyrannical regimes. 

Both sides on this issue are failing. The opposition does not respect the law, and their resistance to the administration’s immigration reforms is not civil disobedience. In the street, it has become increasingly violent, and increasingly supported and encouraged by local and state governments that claim the moral high ground of civil disobedience while promoting and indulging in mob violence. Police, under the orders of their civilian masters, stand aside while the feds hesitate to enforce existing federal law against the protestors.

More important than the mob violence itself are declarations by governors, mayors and police chiefs that federal law is null and void. While there is no obligation for local authorities to enforce federal laws, they cannot — under the Supremacy Clause in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution — nullify those laws or actively obstruct their enforcement by federal agents. 

The last time this happened on any comparable scale was in the 1800s. It started (insofar as we can ever fix a starting point) with the Tariff Act of 1828, which imposed high tariffs on imported foreign products. South Carolina in response passed an Ordinance of Nullification and refused to comply with the new law, or with any related Supreme Court decision; effectively giving the one-finger salute to all three branches of the federal government. President Andrew Jackson received Congressional support for sending federal troops to enforce federal law. South Carolina threatened armed resistance and secession, and then backed down. Until 1860, where the same notions of state sovereignty and nullification of federal law reemerged and led first to the secession of South Carolina and the rest of what became the Confederate States from the Union, and then to civil war, the bloodiest war in American history by an order of magnitude. 

The irony here is that establishment of “sanctuary” states and cities, and encouragement of mob action against federal agents enforcing immigration law, places Gavin Newsome, Mayor Bass of Los Angeles, Governor Pritzker of Illinois, Mayor Johnson of Chicago, and many others, squarely on the same, wrong side of the law as John C. Calhoun and other states’ rights proponents — all from slave states — from 1828 until the end of the Civil War in 1865, which we were all told in school had settled the questions of secession and federal supremacy for good and all. A common epithet in the Union for Confederate politicians and soldiers in the Civil War was “Secesh,” short for secessionist. I propose we dust it off for the modern incarnation of leftwing anti-federalists, who are on the same knife edge of insurrection and secession as the slave states in 1860-1861. It appears they do not understand history and may be doomed to repeat it. 

Abraham Lincoln — fittingly in this context — once wrote that “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” Who wishes this? Who would benefit?