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Others in the GOP field make a point of supporting the 10th Amendment while avoiding the sensitive language. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who won last week's South Carolina primary, is a case in point. Back in 2005, when blogger John Hawkins asked him about a constitutional amendment to protect marriage, Gingrich replied, "Well, I think that the question is whether or not the Congress could pass a law which protected marriage or whether, because of states' rights, Congress does not have the ability to then enforce that without a constitutional amendment." More recently, Gingrich appears to have dumped the loaded term. For example, in announcing the formation of Team 10, his Facebook page described it as an effort to work with Americans "to develop ideas for enforcing the 10th Amendment and returning power back home." Asked at a recent candidate event whether he thought states had the right to nullify a law under the 10th Amendment if they believed it to be unconstitutional, former Sen. Rick Santorum answered carefully. "We had a war about nullification," he said, adding that states could instead litigate such an issue in federal court. Paul, appearing last month on "The Tonight Show," parsed the concept, too. "Well, you know, we all use the word
'states' rights,'" he said. "But in a way, states don't have rights. Only individuals have rights. But the authority and the power goes to the states." In a Jan. 4 column on STLtoday.com, former Missouri state Sen. Jeff Smith, a Democrat, called the "exaltation" of states' rights a "dog whistle to Republican voters conditioned by a generation of Republican politicians and operatives before them who exploited racial fears for personal and partisan advancement."
Candidates denied any such hidden agenda or secret coding. Whatever reaction it evokes, Cobb, the Georgia historian, said the term has clearly lost much of its sting. "It's just become part of the lexicon, without any particular meaning," he says. "It's been historically decontextualized to the point that it can be thrown around by a lot of people without a second thought." Reed, the UNC professor, said that's not necessarily a bad thing. "I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while
-- like, 150 years or so," he said. "I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me."
[Associated
Press;
Allen G. Breed is a national writer, based in Raleigh, N.C. He can be reached at features@ap.org.
Follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/AllenGBreed.
Copyright 2012 The Associated
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