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Thomas Jefferson doesn't have much in common with Tim Walz, but in his more radical moments, the Sage of Monticello might have appreciated the spirit of the Minnesota governor's campaign to resist federal immigration enforcement.

In 1798, Jefferson authored a first draft of the Kentucky Resolutions outlining a purported right of states to nullify overreach by the federal government.

The Kentucky Resolutions -- and a related effort in Virginia -- were a response to the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by the Federalists and considered repressive and unconstitutional by Jefferson and his partisan compatriots.

Jefferson urged the states to declare "these acts void, and of no force." They should see that "neither these acts, nor any others of the General Government not plainly and intentionally authorized by the Constitution, shall be exercised within their respective territories."

The former secretary of state and future president posited that "every state has a natural right ... to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits."

Jefferson's draft was toned down before the Kentucky Resolutions were adopted, while Virginia passed its own version drafted by James Madison. When the federal government undertook a "deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise" of unconstitutional powers, it averred, the states are "in duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress of the evil." It was never quite spelled out what this interposition actually entailed.

No one will ever accuse Gov. Walz or Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of being supple political thinkers on the order of Jefferson or Madison, but they are getting at a version of the same thing in their contention that they should have de facto veto power over the nature and extent of federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota.

The state's lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking to stop the enforcement surge relies, in an echo of the 18th-century resolutions, on the 10th Amendment, which reserves powers not granted to the federal government to the states. A lawyer for Minnesota has called the Department of Homeland Security surge an "unlawful and unchecked invasion," as if the state is a separate country that can make its own immigration policy.

Then, there's the direct action against DHS agents in the streets. Encouraged by public officials, it is meant to make Minnesota such a hostile environment for DHS that it has no choice but to quit the field and accede to the state's immigration priorities and jettison its own. This is, in effect, a heckler's veto over federal immigration enforcement.

All of this flies in the face of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which says that federal law takes precedence over conflicting state laws.

Jefferson and Madison had an excuse back when the federal role had not been firmly established, although other states at the time strongly rejected the resolutions. In a long series of decisions, stretching from the iconic McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819 through cases occasioned by state resistance to school desegregation in the 1950s through today, the Supreme Court has vindicated the Supremacy Clause.

This is not to say, obviously, that states don't have their sovereign powers; it's just that immigration policy is not one of them. In the Obama years, the Supreme Court held that federal power in this area is so "broad" and "undoubted" that even state-level laws in Arizona meant to complement the federal enforcement regime didn't pass muster.

There is a some chance, though, that Minnesota is going to get away with it. The political reaction to the tragic deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti has the administration suddenly singing a different tune on the Minneapolis operation, and Trump allies calling on him to stand down. Maybe the president can get a deal worth having with the state, but the situation is a little like Florida deciding it doesn't like federal taxes and wringing concessions from the IRS based on massive grass-roots resistance to tax collection.

More than 200 years after the Kentucky Resolutions, a version of nullification still lives.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)

(c) 2025 by King Features Syndicate