The same logic should apply to all federal impositions on the sovereign States and their constitutional roles and responsibilities.
Medicaid, child support enforcement, education, all the way down to traffic enforcement campaigns . . . which the states “voluntarily” undertake to get “federal” money . . .
BUT WHERE does “federal” money come from ??? We are citizens of the several sovereign States. The feds have no direct citizens except maybe the territories such as Somoa . . .
The imposition can only work because the feds take the lion’s share of the tax revenue of the people of the States!
It should be the other way around since the fed’s constitutional powers are limited.
Logically the feds should not be able to impose DIRECT TAXATION on residents of the sovereign States. IMHO.
The States need to be doing a lot more of the type of thing.
Makes sense, and if they had to lexy the tax on the state governments, those governments would all of a sudden get a lot more uppity about federal taxes, since they would want to be the ones who distribute the bennies.
They can and have in the past, and constitutional crises related to it were averted over this through negotiations etc but this was a contributing part to what lead to the Civil War. We are at the end of the day a federation of states, each state is independent and the federal government while stronger than that of the articles of confederation is not almighty.
States by the constitution do indeed have the ability legally to nullify the enforcement of federal laws within their borders, provided such laws are not explicitly within the powers of the federal government within the constitution.
How this is generally worked around is that the fed will withhold monies if the states don’t enforce the laws, but states for the most part can indeed nullify federal laws if they choose to.