South Carolina state Rep. Bill Chumley really hates the Affordable Care Act. So much so that he introduced a wildly unconstitutional bill that would imprison any federal official who enforces Obamacare in the state of South Carolina for up to five years.
Chumley, however, isn’t just wasting the state legislature’s time with unconstitutional fantasies about nullifying health reform and giving big government’s employees their comeuppance, he also wasted taxpayer money shuttling a questionable “expert” into the state to testify in favor of his proto-Confederate proposal:
Rep. Bill Chumley of Woodruff brought Walter Williams from a suburban Washington airport to push for a bill that initially sought to nullify the federal health care law. The state planes’ four legs — to a Manassas, Va., airport and back, to pick up Williams and return him — would have cost a paying passenger nearly $6,400, according to the state Aeronautics Commission’s manifest and flight log.
Williams, a syndicated columnist and radio commentator who sometimes fills in for Rush Limbaugh, is well known for advocating state measures attempting to nullify the federal law.
Chumley again dismissed requests that he reimburse the state, calling Williams’ testimony official state business.
Nullification, the idea that states can invalidate federal laws — or worse, criminalize their enforcement — conflicts directly with the Constitution’s declaration that duly-enacted federal laws “shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” As James Madison once warned, if states did have the unilateral authority to nullify federal laws, such a power would “speedily put an end to the Union itself.”