Nullification, or to nullify, is usually a stunning erasure — to quash, undo, repudiate, wipe out.

“Jury nullification” joined the lexicon of crime- and court-watchers once a jury verdict acquitted O.J. Simpson of murder in 1995.

Socio-political nullification today is more than garden-variety civil disobedience or hotly contested policy preferences.  Nullification has become an embedded new norm, as institutions — many existing for centuries — are tipped, toppled, and smelted.

Nullification is no longer the shock of the new.

Empty the prisons, refuse to prosecute violent criminals, defund the police while allowing homelessness and disease to overwhelm public spaces, normalize unrestricted open borders as millions of unvetted illegal migrants flood every city and town, deny fundamental human biology, reward terrorists with promises of statehood. 

Oxymorons become articles of truth.  Propagation of truth depends on suppressing free speech.  Scientific evidentiary rational inquiry challenging ideological consensus must be crushed.

Identity socio-politics defines justice.  Democracy needs to be upended to save it.

And now political opponents are prosecuted simply because they are political enemies.

To wit: the relentless nullification of Donald Trump.  Let us count the ways.  Russia-gate hoax, the Mueller special counsel investigation, two impeachments, attempts at ballot disqualification in Maine and Colorado, five frivolous lawsuits...

A hand-picked lawfare jury and corrupt judge finally nullified Donald Trump with a conviction for an ethereal felony in N.Y. City.  The irony cannot be rich enough where violent crimes go unpunished — indeed, where the stigma of “convicted felon” was a racist construct — but now a singularly and breathlessly notorious label is resurrected only for a target of hollow indictments and bills of attainder.

The most vilified political enemy is corralled into the ranks of erstwhile criminals, only because he is a political opponent, who just might nullify the nullifiers.

Well, nullification is all the rage, at least for a day, a week, an election season, until it isn’t.  And who shall posit that Donald Trump is foreclosed from nullifying his political enemies by winning at the ballot box?  Or will his enemies nullify the electoral wave of everyday Joes and Marys who have had enough of Democrat party despotism, by nullifying the ballot box itself?  Still, what if Donald Trump prevails and defeats nullification?

Who and what shall then be nullified?

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.