As to the cases, Sir, which do not come before the courts, those political questions which terminate with the enactments of Congress, it is of necessity that these should be ultimately decided by Congress itself.  Like other legislatures, it must be trusted with this power.  The members of Congress are chosen by the people, and they are answerable to the people; like other public agents, they are bound by oath to support the Constitution.  These are the securities that they will not violate their duty, nor transcend their powers.  They are the same securities that prevail in other popular governments; nor is it easy to see how grants of power can be more safely guarded, without rendering them nugatory.  If the case cannot come before the courts, and if Congress be not trusted with its decision, who shall decide it?  The gentleman says, each State is to decide it for herself.  If so, then, as I have already urged, what is law in one State is not law in another.  Or, if the resistance of one State compels an entire repeal of the law, then a minority, and that a small one, governs the whole country.

Sir, those who espouse the doctrines of nullification reject, as it seems to me, the first great principle of all republican liberty; that is, that the majority must govern.  In matters of common concern, the judgment of a majority must stand as the judgment of the whole.  This is a law imposed on us by the absolute necessity of the case; and if we do not act upon it, there is no possibility of maintaining any government but despotism.  We hear loud and repeated denunciations against what is called majority government.  It is declared, with much warmth, that a majority government cannot be maintained in the United States.  What, then, do gentlemen wish?  Do they wish to establish a minority government?  Do they wish to subject the will of the many to the will of the few?  The honorable gentleman from South Carolina has spoken of absolute majorities and majorities concurrent; language wholly unknown to our Constitution, and to which it is not easy to affix definite ideas.  As far as I understand it, it would teach us that the absolute majority may be found in Congress, but the majority concurrent must be looked for in the States; that is to say, Sir, stripping the matter of this novelty of phrase, that the dissent of one or more States, as States, renders void the decision of a majority of Congress, so far as that State is concerned.  And so this doctrine, running but a short career, like other dogmas of the day, terminates in nullification.