Appearing on Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto, Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano and 9/11 truther advised states that they could choose not to obey the health care reform law in accordance with the supposed “great American tradition” of states nullifying federal law.

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This is not the first time that Napolitano has pushed the radical theory of nullification, under which state officials supposedly do not have to follow federal laws that they believe are unconstitutional.

The nullification argument was used by southern states prior to the Civil War and in response to Brown v. Board of Education. And it has been rejected by the Supreme Court. Indeed, in the 1958 case of Cooper v. Aaron, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Arkansas' attempt to nullify desegregation decisions by federal courts on the grounds that “Article VI of the Constitution makes the Constitution the 'supreme Law of the Land' ” and the federal courts are the ultimate arbiters of the Constitution.

Since Article IV also makes “the laws of the United States” passed pursuant to the Constitution the “supreme Law of the Land,” it seems likely Cooper applies to attempts to nullify statutory law as well as attempts to nullify federal court decisions.

But that's not all that's wrong with Napolitano's arguments. He lists three situations in which states have supposedly successfully engaged in nullification. And each of his examples is dead wrong.

First, Napolitano stated that “Congress has mandated time zones, and some states where the time zone runs right through the states have disregarded the Congress and picked one they want to be in.”

In fact, Congress did not mandate that state governments follow federal time zone rules. Rather, Congress 000-.html">announced a “policy of the United States to promote the adoption and observance of uniform time within the standard time zones” and 000-.html">ordered transportation companies to follow uniform time. Congress also 000-.html">gave the Secretary of Transportation the power to set the borders of the time zones, which gave states the ability to petition the secretary for changes in the borders. Thus, states declaring that they will not follow federal time zone laws would not constitute nullification of the federal law since the federal law does not require states to follow it.

Second, Napolitano stated that “Congress has said that all use of marijuana is unlawful, but 14 states have medical marijuana in defiance of the federal law.”

In fact, medical marijuana laws do not constitute a nullification of the federal ban on marijuana. The federal ban does not require states to institute their own bans on marijuana. Furthermore, in Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court specifically upheld the federal government's power to punish Californians for marijuana possession even though they had prescriptions for medicinal marijuana that were valid in California.

Third, Napolitano stated that “Congress has said to every state that you have to comply with the REAL ID Act, which is a biometric imprint inside everybody's driver's license, very, very expensive. And 47 states have said, 'no, we're not going to do that.' ”

Napolitano is correct that almost all states are not complying with the requirement that they have tamper-proof ID cards by May 2008. However, they are not violating federal law. In fact, Congress specifically gave the administration the power to “grant to a State an extension of time to meet the requirements of section 202(a)(1) if the State provides adequate justification for noncompliance.” According to USA Today, the Department of Homeland Security granted such an extension to all states in April 2008. USA Today added: “the states were granted extensions after promising to take -- or proving they already had taken -- early steps to improve their licenses.”