Health care ‘nullification’
0 Comments | Call & Post; All-Ohio edition, Mar 31-Apr 6, 2010
When Ohio Republican State Senators Shannon Jones of Springboro and Timothy Grendell of Chesterland introduced their legislation to overturn a federal mandate that individuals buy health insurance, contained in the recently passed federal health care reform bill, they carried on an ugly tradition in American history.
“Nullification,” the idea that states have the power to overturn federal laws which they don’t like, is as old as South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun and his fight to protect slavery in the 1830s or Orville Faubus in Arkansas, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, and George Wallace in Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s.
Even the language of Grendell and Jones – and other republicans on this subject – barkens back to a different time. Grendell called the health care bill in its entirety a “frontal assault” on states’ rights.
And, in a related statement urging Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to join a suit filed by 14 other states attorney generals, 13 Republicans and Sen
buying individual health insurance