Akhil Reed Amar wants Americans to “break up” with Thomas Jefferson and instead toast other Founders such as Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. In the first post in this series, I dealt with Amar’s attack on Jefferson based on the Virginian’s opposition to the national bank. Amar also finds fault with Jefferson because “[h]e fathered the false idea that each state could legitimately ‘nullify’ a federal law on its own say-so (as distinct from sounding political alarms against unconstitutional federal actions, filing lawsuits, or doing other things that ultimately relied on national legal and political dispute-resolution mechanisms).”
Amar ignores the history of the American Revolution
