Null and void

You may have heard that a group of Republican (plus one Dem -- it's bipartisan!) Attorneys General are planning to use the notion of "nullification" to argue that state legislatures have the power under the Constitution to declare null and void a federal statute imposed upon them. Like, ahem, health care reform. It's not much of an argument, but the idea has a long, disgusting past that's led to, among other things, nearly 600,000 dead in the early 1860s and, more recently, Jim Crow laws. Sean Wilentz provides a neat historical overview of the oft-invoked, and oft-rejected notion that posits that when a minority loses an election, the results of that election must not be legitimate.