Hello and welcome to this edition of The Autograph. You're on Press TV with me, Susan Modaris.
We're coming to you from New York City. My guest this week is author and historian Tom
Thomas E. Woods. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller Meltdown. However, I'm sitting down to talk to him about his new book, Nullification. What is it? And is it about to start a new movement across the United States? Stay tuned and find out.
Historian and author of 10 books, Thomas E. Woods Jr. holds a bachelor degree in history from Harvard University, a master's from MPhil and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Author of the New York Times bestseller Meltdown and the politically incorrect guide to American history, his new book is titled Nullification, How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.
Woods believes that citizens across the United States are fed up with politicians in Washington
telling them how to live their lives and then sticking them with a bill. He explains to
his readers that nullification allows states to reject unconstitutional federal laws.
For many, nullification is rapidly becoming the only way to stop an overreaching government
drunk on power. From privacy to national healthcare, Woods shows how this growing and popular movement
is sweeping. I met up with Thomas Woods in New York City while he was on his book tour
to talk about what may soon become one of the most controversial topics of our time.
Tom Woods, thank you for joining us here in New York.
My pleasure.
I'd like to start off from the very beginning because some of our viewers have never come
across the term nullification. What is nullification, historically speaking, and who are the creators?
Well first we have to understand that the United States, when it was established, was
established as a collection of self-governing communities, that's what it was.
So it was customary to speak of the United States in the plural, so you would say the
United States are a nice place to live.
The emphasis was on this collection of self-governing societies.
That's what the American War for Independence was about, that each of the colonies wanted
to be a self-governing society, but the British government wasn't allowing that.
So when they established their own government, obviously they didn't want to undermine the
self-governing societies, that was the whole point of breaking with Britain.
So in the U.S. Constitution, in 1791, there were ten amendments that were added to it,
known as the Bill of Rights.
The tenth amendment says that any power that the states, when they created the federal
government, any power that the states did not delegate to that government remains with
them.
So any power that's not mentioned in the Constitution is presumed to rest with the
Well, nullification simply derives from this point. The further point, and it was Thomas Jefferson who really codified this idea, that if the Federal Government does try to exercise a power that's not listed in the Constitution and that rests with the states, if it does go beyond its constitutional boundaries, then the states would be bound to resist this act of the Federal Government and therefore within its borders the state would nullify that act.
And the U.S. Constitution was sold to the people of Virginia by taking these aspects into consideration.
That's exactly right. This is hardly known, I would say, among the American population.
If you found even 1% of the population that knew, frankly, what I'm about to tell you, it would be amazing.
But Virginia was arguably the most important of the original states because so many of our important statesmen came from Virginia.
The Virginians were very skeptical about the Constitution.
So in 1788, when they were being asked to decide whether or not to ratify it, skeptics
like Patrick Henry were saying, this government outlined in the Constitution is going to grow
to a level at which no one will be able to control it, it will have no practical limits.
And so supporters of the Constitution assured Henry and other skeptics, don't worry about
it.
This government will have only the powers expressly delegated to it.
And if this government should try to reach for a power not delegated to it, don't worry.
Virginia will be exonerated from that action.
So there really is in germ the idea of nullification.
And Jefferson is really simply drawing it out in 1798 when he really spelled out the
idea of nullification.
You were quoted as saying that it's going to be a lot harder to get the kind of media for this book that I have gotten for my many other books. Why is that?
The idea of nullification is not a popular one. I mean, most Americans have never even heard of it.
But any time you emphasize anything involving the states and the powers of the states, American students, school children, have been taught to believe that anybody advocating this must have sinister intentions.
The only reason you could advocate this is that you want to use these powers of the states to oppress minorities and so on.
Now, nobody doubts that the states can be oppressive, any government can be oppressive. That's not the issue.
The federal government can be oppressive too. The federal government threw a couple hundred thousand Japanese Americans into concentration camps during World War II.
And it would have been nice to nullify that if the states had had the backbone to do it.
The point is that today, in 2010, in the South, you do not see the problems that you had in 1960.
Blacks are moving to the South. They're not moving away. They're moving to the South.
That's where they actually find that people treat them reasonably well.
Blacks are not moving to New York, by and large, these days.
And not just because it's impossibly expensive to live in New York.
Nevertheless, there is this presumption that anyone who favors local self-government must have some sinister agenda.
and that is exactly the opposite of the truth every dictator who ever lived has
always opposed the kind of decentralized arrangement that is our birthright in
the US either you have a system in which there's one giant jurisdiction and you
just hope that liberty is preserved there or you have a system with a bunch
of competing jurisdictions in which people can leave if one becomes too
oppressive I think the second one in the long run in which different states are
What was the main driving factor when coming out with this book? Was timing of essence
as well?
Well, it's interesting. I was working on a totally different book, and then suddenly
I thought, I should do a book on nullification. I'm such a ridiculous workaholic. I'm already
working on a book. Let me work on this one. But the reason I did it was that I noticed
The thing is that a lot of people were starting to talk about it, and my videos, just that I've done as a historian on this topic, are starting to be viewed by a lot of people, and people are talking about it, and I never imagined that this would come up again.
I figured this would be a dusty old historical issue, and I like dusty old historical issues, and that's fine, but I didn't think it would be a live issue once again.
When I see that across the country on a variety of issues, on both left and right, there are
some states saying, you know what, we're just not doing this.
Like you know and I know this is not in the Constitution, so we're just not doing it.
So I thought, this is a healthy thing, that we're restoring a humane scale to our political
life.
I mean, one regime for 309 million people, that is inhumane.
And so to restore some kind of human scale to political life, I thought, this is such
a wonderful thing.
And so this movement should have like a kind of handbook, because it will be demonized.
Again, people will assume these are wicked, terrible people.
They need to have a book that tells this forgotten history that defends what they're doing, shows
how purely American it is, shows how moral it is, how constitutional it is.
So I decided, let's get this thing out, but again, let's get it out quickly.
The sooner people have it, the sooner they can act on it.
And frankly, I'm partly a little concerned that if the president does not win re-election
in 2012, and instead is replaced by some Republican, you know, middle-of-the-road hack, you know,
just like we usually have, that all this momentum behind wanting to push against the federal
government will disappear.
Because a lot of conservatives will think, well, we have one of our own in the White
House now, nothing to worry about.
A lot of people still think we've got a vibrant two-party system, it is, it's shocking, but
if the other party gets in, I'm afraid the enthusiasm for this will disappear.
In Nullification, How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, Woods explains not only
why nullification is the constitutional tool the founders of the United States envision,
but how it works, and has already been employed in cases ranging from upholding the First
Amendment to knocking down slave laws before the Civil War. Some of the issues Woods talks
about how the states were meant to be checked against federal tyranny and how
a growing roster of governors are recognizing they need to become that
again. Why it was left to the states to uphold the simple principle that an
unconstitutional law is no law at all. Why without nullification ordinary
Americans will continue to suffer oppression of unjust unconstitutional
laws. How hasn't the strategy of giving full authority to federal government not
Well, I think people never really consider the alternative. They think either the federal government should impose this kind of educational standard or that kind of educational standard.
It never occurs to them, should the federal government impose an educational standard? I mean, isn't that implicitly saying that people are too stupid to run their own schools?
I mean, this is what it means to be a self-governing person living in a self-governing community. Your community makes decisions for itself.
and sometimes you might make stupid decisions but at least therefore the
fallout of your stupid decision is limited. What if the central government
makes a catastrophically bad decision? There's no escaping it. So at least here you
can let a hundred flowers bloom. This place does something stupid or this
place taxes the population too much, well then those people leave and places
that leave people alone get rewarded. So on net other governments are going to
want to imitate that one. Whereas in the United States it is so centralized that
That ability for one government to compete with another one and be an alternative, an example, a counter example to others, is just rendered inoperative.
And so we have this situation now in which we have a government that's completely unresponsive to the people.
In fact, I've got the statistic in the book about the number of representatives we have now.
When the U.S. Congress first opened its doors, there was one representative for every 30,000 Americans, which was 5,000 voting citizens.
It's now one representative for over 700,000 Americans.
So if we had that ratio in 1791, we would have had four people in our House of Representatives.
And every four years, we have this low-intensity civil war to see who gets to control everything.
Who gets to dictate to the schools, dictate the agriculture policy, dictate to the whole country?
What if we could just have an alternative to this?
Regardless of whether it worked or not, it's just not the kind of life that I think if people were given the choice, they would choose.
But the fact is it isn't working because right now the U.S. government is so remote, so unresponsive to anyone other than people with money and people who are lobbyists,
that we now have a system in which our old age program Medicare that provides medicine for medical care for older folks and social security are so underfunded that it would take an additional, on top of the money we spend on it now, an additional $100 trillion to make them actually sound and that figure comes from the head of the Federal Reserve of Dallas, Richard Fisher and yet in spite of this overwhelming
and the tsunami that's about to hit, the U.S. government continues making promises and continues printing up money and handing it to people as if nothing's wrong.
If most decision-making power had been left in the hands of Massachusetts, Vermont, Florida, there is zero chance that we would be in a situation like this.
Absolutely zero. Because at least there the people have some modicum of control.
To quote Robert Murphy, a friend of Wood's, a surprise in the book is Chapter 4, What
is, or are, the United States anyway.
Here Woods makes a compelling argument for the compact theory of the union, which is
the view that the federal government was created by the individual states when they ratified
the U.S. Constitution.
The nationalist view holds that the people of the United States collectively formed
the central government and that therefore the individual state governments are subordinate
to it.
There really was no competing theory, spelled out, systematic competing theory to the compact theory until about 1830.
So this was the theory. And we associate it with Thomas Jefferson and people who followed him.
But the compact theory says that the United States is a compact among sovereign, self-governing states.
That the United States is not fundamentally a single whole. It is the United States, not the United State.
And again, that's the whole point of the separation from Britain, is that we wanted to have self-governing communities under the military defense umbrella of a single central government.
Now that is, of course, the model that we've been moving away from for quite some time, but nevertheless, the evidence, as I think I show in nullification, is just overwhelming.
The most overwhelming, probably the most obvious and clearest piece of historical evidence on this point is the manner in which the Constitution was ratified.
We didn't have a single vote of the American people in the aggregate. We had votes taken separately in each of the states.
In fact, Rhode Island did not choose to ratify the Constitution for two full years after it had already taken effect over some of the other states.
So, each state was separate, independent, and James Madison said that if a state had chosen not to ratify the Constitution, then there would have been no political relations subsisting between us and them.
Today, of course, we have moved completely away from that model, but I think that model has much to recommend.
The whole world has moved toward strong, centralized governments that do not have any competing jurisdictions within their boundaries.
Won't breaking the government in different states at this point in time when there is
already a sense of tug-of-war, so to say, between the two parties on so many issues
is created chaos and ultimately lead to secession?
Well, I don't know.
When nullification was suggested by Jefferson and then later by other American figures,
by and large they thought of it as an alternative to secession, that it was the moderate middle
ground between secession on the one hand and complete submission on the other.
So nullification was thought to be a way that you could stay in the union and enjoy whatever
benefits that brought, but yet at the same time resist something that you believed was
is unconstitutional. So nullification could in fact help to hold the Union together. But
at the same time, nullification is kind of a last resort. I mean, the fact that we are
resorting to it means that all other options really have failed at this point. So it's
very hard to say what the future will hold, but at least I think we can find enough issues
on which left and right agree that, you know, whatever our own opinions are, the Federal
The federal government has nothing to do with this issue. They should leave us alone to make our own decisions.
I think there are enough cases of that, that we can peacefully push off the federal government and say,
don't worry, you have enough problems to worry about as it is. Leave these matters to us in the States.
We're not a bunch of stupid rubes. We are self-governing individuals, as Jefferson wanted us to be.
And has the government been receptive in addressing the issue of nullification, or perhaps when it's questioned,
And how has it responded when at one point or another a reporter, for example, comes
out and says, this law that's being passed is not constitutional, because I know in the
very beginning of your book you have a story of when the U.S. House Speaker was asked the
question how she responded to this issue.
That's right.
The Speaker of the U.S. House was asked to justify from the Constitution how she could
You could get away with the health care legislation and you would think she could at least refer to some clause, even if it was a stretch, say something.
Instead she said, are you serious? And then just laughed.
Well, that wasn't really a stupid question, sort of a legitimate question.
And again, it should not be hard for her to at least come up with at least a silly answer, some answer.
But the idea of nullification is that it forces them to take account of the Constitution.
You can pass all these laws, but if the people aren't going to obey them, then are you going to send tanks in to Texas or Maine or New Hampshire, really, because of medical marijuana or because of a gun issue? Really.
So nullification in a way is a kind of way to say to the federal government, look, you want us to do this, we're not going to do this, so now what?
Isn't the Supreme Court responsible to stop the federal government from passing laws that
are not constitutional?
The Supreme Court has a role to play.
Now Jefferson's view is that the Supreme Court was largely an advisory body because he did
not trust giving any number of unelected people the final word on the meaning of the Constitution
because then they would be running the country.
More than that though, he feared giving the federal government a monopoly in general on
The problem with the Supreme Court is not only that the Supreme Court is not an impartial arbiter, but it's also that the Supreme Court has to accept a case.
The Supreme Court could decide, we don't even want to hear this case, and so then there could well be an unconstitutional act.
If the Supreme Court won't hear it, then what recourse do the people have? There must be something beyond this.
And in his famous so-called report of 1800, James Madison, who was the president of the United States,
And in his famous so-called report of 1800, James Madison said that we have to have some mechanism to protect our liberties in those cases in which even the judicial branch is not an appropriate or a responsible sentinel for our liberties.
And where does the signing of memos fall in your discussion considering the fact that since the Reagan administration onward there has been the signing of these memos which reached its peak during the Bush administration
Administration and then was rolled back, so to say, during the Obama administration where the president basically feels that a certain law is not constitutional and it writes it off and it signs it off.
Well, there are two issues that come up in what you've discussed. One of them is called a signing statement and that really peaked under George W. Bush. So that is when the president goes to sign a bill into law.
This used to be just a purely ceremonial affair, you know, the Girl Scouts come there and everybody's smiling and he puts a signature to it.
But George W. Bush really pushed forward an innovation whereby in the statement attached to his signature he would say,
oh, by the way, I really think that Article 2, Section 3 of this is an unconstitutional constraint on my power, so I'm not going to enforce it.
But usually, these were perfectly constitutional constraints on the president's power.
But he would just sort of say, well, I just don't think I'm going to enforce this.
Now, historically, the understanding was, you either take all of a bill or you take none of it.
And there were reasons for that. But if he doesn't like a provision in it, he vetoes it and he sends it back to be redrafted.
He can't pick and choose. But that's what began to happen, was that, you know, if I want to torture, I'm going to torture regardless of what this says.
If I want to give money to some overseas war and I'm told I can't, I'm going to do it anyway.
Even John McCain, who was hoping to be the Republican successor to George W. Bush, even he said he wouldn't do that as president.
So the signing statements really were important.
But also there's the executive order, which is the idea of the president basically just going ahead and making a law.
Making a law, like he feels like the congress won't support him, so he'll just sign it
into law without congressional authorization, and that's been done a number of times in
American history, it really picked up in the 20th century. There are some times when the
president can do that, like if the president pardons someone who's guilty of a crime, he
does that through an executive order, that's fine, the constitution gives him the authority
to pardon people. But what if he basically exercises a congressional power, like what
What if he imposes a new tax without consulting Congress and just institutes it as an executive order?
Well, a lot of times he has done that. The president during World War II, there was a brief moment where Franklin Roosevelt imposed on his own a 100% tax on all income over $25,000.
Well, eventually Congress intervened and said, now wait, you cannot do that.
But what usually happens is, once something has been enacted by a president, now people
get used to it, or the Congress will eventually reconcile itself to it, so it's a very dangerous
thing.
And finally, the supporters of your work and idea have termed your latest work, Nullification,
to be a gem.
But what is your message to those who have not converted, so to say, and who argue that
The ideas that you pose are very in line with conservatism and the Tea Party movement and
taking the United States back, so to say, to the Bush era, perhaps?
Well, I don't think anyone anywhere in American life has talked about decentralizing power
for years and years. I mean, certainly I didn't see any power being decentralized under George
Mr. W. Bush, Mr. I'm going to go to war on my own say-so, I'm going to engage in warrantless wiretaps and listen to your phone conversation.
I mean, does that sound like a guy who wants to turn power over to local communities?
The neoconservatives are probably my biggest opponents on this. They argue for a so-called national greatness conservatism.
So the idea of states dissenting from the federal government is utterly distasteful to them.
Today and the mainstream left will be arm and arm against me on this.
But the old-timey, old-fashioned left, like my friend Kirkpatrick Sale, who years ago
wrote a book called Human Scale, in which he said, business is too big, agriculture
is too big, government is too big, it's just on a scale that's just not appropriate for
real human life, face-to-face interaction.
And so he thinks, yeah, we've got to cut this thing down, and yeah, in my community, we're
We're going to socialize the cost of a lot of things, and in your community maybe you won't, but I live in my community, you'll live in yours, and we'll both be happy.
Where the heck did that go? So there's no reason this has to be a left or right issue.
And in fact, in California, there's a ballot initiative now to decriminalize marijuana, not just for medicinal purposes, but across the board.
Now that's not a cause that's associated with the right wing, but it's one that I heartily support.
Even if I didn't support decriminalizing marijuana, I would still support the power of California
to do it, so that we could again have some type of competition.
Well, people who like that can live there and people who don't can live somewhere else.
There's no reason that that should be conservative or liberal.
The real distinction is between people who believe in governing themselves and imperial
people who believe in running everyone's life.
Tom Woods, thank you for joining us on The Autograph.
My pleasure.
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