# States' Rights The doctrine that the states retain sovereignty against the federal government — as constitutional theory, a reading of the [[Tenth Amendment]]; as politics, the banner under which every major resistance to national authority has marched, and the reason the phrase cannot be used innocently in American argument. The vault keeps two things apart: the structural question of [[Federalism]], which is live and bipartisan ([[Federalism Powers Crosswalk]] maps it), and *states' rights* as a slogan, which has a specific history. ## The history [[Thomas Jefferson]] and [[James Madison]] wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 to argue that states could judge federal laws unconstitutional — the Alien and Sedition Acts — and Madison spent his old age insisting he had not meant what [[John C. Calhoun]] made of it: the [[Nullification Crisis]] of 1832, in which South Carolina declared a federal tariff void, and the theory that a state could leave. The doctrine's founding paradox is that the Confederacy invoked it to protect slavery and then, once formed, overrode its own states at will; the [[Dual Federalism]] the Supreme Court enforced from the 1870s through the 1930s used it to strike down federal labor and child-welfare law; and its twentieth-century meaning was fixed by the [[Dixiecrats]] of 1948, who ran a presidential ticket named the States' Rights Democratic Party against Truman's civil-rights plank, and by [[Massive Resistance]] to *[[Brown v. Board of Education]]* — the "Southern Manifesto," the interposition resolutions, the closed schools. When Reagan opened his 1980 general-election campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi with the words "I believe in states' rights," the audience understood the reference; so did everyone else. ## Now The doctrine has changed sides more than once. Since the 1990s the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts' federalism revival — anti-commandeering, limits on the commerce power, the end of Voting Rights Act preclearance in *Shelby County* (2013) — has been a conservative project, and the [[Convention of States Action]] campaign backed by governors like [[Kevin Stitt]], [[Mike Dunleavy]] and [[Rick Perry]] seeks to amend the Constitution on states'-rights lines. But the second Trump term has inverted the valence: it is blue states asserting [[Sanctuary Jurisdiction]] policies, resisting National Guard federalization, and suing over federal preemption, while the administration invokes national power against them. The [[Libertarian Party]] holds the doctrinal version consistently; the two major parties hold it whenever they are out of federal power. The lesson the vault draws, from Madison onward, is that states' rights has almost never been an end — it is the argument available to whoever is losing at the national level, and its moral content is whatever the underlying dispute is about. ## See Also - [[Federalism]] · [[Federalism Powers Crosswalk]] · [[Dual Federalism]] · [[Tenth Amendment]] · [[Supremacy Clause]] · [[Nullification]] - [[Thomas Jefferson]] · [[James Madison]] · [[John C. Calhoun]] · [[Nullification Crisis]] · [[The Confederacy]] - [[Dixiecrats]] · [[Massive Resistance]] · [[Brown v. Board of Education]] · [[Earl Warren]] · [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] · [[FDR Court-Packing Crisis]] - [[Convention of States Action]] · [[Sanctuary Jurisdiction]] · [[Libertarian Party]] · [[The Grays and the Blues]]