Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s defiant statement on Wednesday rejecting the federal government’s authority to enforce immigration law at the U.S.-Mexico border ratcheted up the already tense stand-off between the state and the Biden administration — and signaled how fully the GOP has become the party of the Southern conservatives it was founded to fight.
Abbott’s declaration that that the Biden administration had “broken the compact between the United States and the States” by failing to “fulfill the duties” of protecting Texas from an “invasion” is an eerie echo of the political thought that gave rise to nullification and secession in the 19th century and resistance to desegregation in the 20th.
Prior to the Civil War, the prevailing view among Southern elites was that the Constitution of the United States of America was merely a compact between the states. Under this theory, states could decide which national laws to follow or not. And, in extreme circumstances, states could exit that compact and secede, if they decided the national government or other states had violated it.
While this framework was endorsed in some fashion by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, the political thinker who most influenced Southern secessionists and, later, segregationists was John C. Calhoun.
Calhoun — who held various offices, including South Carolina senator, secretary of state, secretary of war and vice president — embraced a virulent strand of states-rights legal thinking in defense of slavery when he put forward his theory of nullification in 1828. Since the nation was simply a compact created between the states, this thinking went, states had the ultimate authority to reject federal law they deemed unconstitutional. In 1832, Calhoun’s South Carolina declared that it would not follow two national tariff laws, and, if forced to do so, would secede.
Calhoun’s ideas formed the theory behind the sectional crisis of the 1850s over the admission of new states as…
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