Republicans return to Antebellum era theories to justify Trump's civil war push

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Republicans return to Antebellum era theories to justify Trump’s civil war push
The crisis alongside the Texas border is just the latest instance of Republicans looking back to the Antebellum era

By CONOR LYNCH
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 18, 2024 9:00AM (EST)


(Salon) Back in 2019, when then-candidate Joe Biden was campaigning on the promise of restoring “normalcy” to American politics after three years of almost daily scandal and chaos in the White House, he made a prediction that would regularly come back to haunt him after becoming president. “The thing that will fundamentally change things,” said the former vice president at a campaign event in New Hampshire, “is with Donald Trump out of the White House. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”

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For Republicans in the age of Trump, politics has degraded to something akin to war. It is a matter of “friends” and “enemies,” to borrow the famous distinction made a century ago by the “crown jurist” of Nazi Germany, Carl Schmitt. According to that notorious critic of liberalism, who many on the so-called “New Right” have come to embrace in recent years, the political represents “the most intense and extreme antagonism” between adversaries who seek to “negate” each other’s “way of life.” In the Schmittian view of politics, then, there is no way to forestall a “decisive bloody battle” (despite the efforts of liberals to transform politics into “everlasting discussion”). Post-Trump Republicans have effectively adopted Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” distinction as their own, while abandoning any previous commitments — tenuous as they were — to democratic compromise.

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The collapse of the border deal came against the backdrop of an unfolding crisis in Texas, where state officials have refused to allow federal immigration agents access to a section of the border along the Rio Grande. After the Supreme Court ruled that Texas had to give federal border agents access in late January, the Lone Star state’s governor Greg Abbott issued a defiant statement in which he invoked long-discredited constitutional theories employed by Southern secessionists in the lead up to the Civil War. Declaring that the federal government had “broken the compact” between the states by failing to protect them from “invasion” — in this case, illegal immigration — the right-wing governor proclaimed that Texas had “supreme” authority that “supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary,” putting forward a modern spin on the concept of nullification. As Stephen Vladeck, a legal scholar at the University of Texas School of Law, observed in the Houston Chronicle, Abbott’s argument has “eerie parallels” to the Antebellum-era idea that “states have the right to ‘nullify’ federal laws that they believe are unconstitutional, whether or not the courts agree with them.” It also rests on a blatant misinterpretation of the Constitution. To justify his claims of “supreme” power, the governor cited an obscure clause that was actually intended to limit state powers, while offering a specious definition of “invasion” that was refuted by James Madison over two centuries ago.

Abbott’s embrace of Antebellum-era constitutional theories might have once earned him universal condemnation, but in 2024 it earned him almost unanimous praise from his fellow Republicans. In a joint statement issued shortly after Abbot’s, 25 Republican governors expressed their support for his defiance of both the Biden administration and the Supreme Court. Echoing their Texas counterpart, the governors accused the Biden administration of abdicating its “constitutional compact duties to the states.” Multiple governors have even sent some of their own troops and personnel to support the Texas governor in his standoff with the feds, which is currently ongoing. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/02/18/return-to-antebellum-era-theories-to-justify-trumps-civil-push/