Legal Commentary

I keep thinking about dropping U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton from my con law class.  I find the short chapter two of Sullivan and Gunther's constitutional law casebook, which contains only McCulloch v. Maryland and U.S. Term Limits, a bit odd, and students wonder why we spend a fair amount of time in class arguing in rather broad terms over the role of sovereignty in our constitutional system before getting to the core doctrinal areas.  As it is, I use the Term Limits case only to discuss sovereignty and tell students the particular facts of the case are relatively unimportant for our purposes.

I see that I had better rethink my rethinking.  New Jerseyites are working on a recall of Senator Menendez; like Eugene, I think they do so in the teeth of the constitutional text.  And the Times today reports on a sovereignty-cum-nullification movement in the state legislatures, in which states are passing laws declaring various federal laws inoperable within their states, including laws involving federal land, on grounds of state sovereignty.  If a Utah state legislator can say, "Who is the sovereign, the state or the federal government?" (answer: both and neither), I guess I had better keep teaching U.S. Term Limits.  I am not sure whether it is amusing or distressing that one of the world's oldest democracies cannot even agree on where sovereignty resides.  I am pretty sure, though, that it is a strike against the arguments that written constitutions are superior because they provide clear directions for the people who live under them.