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Alison L. LaCroix's "What If Madison Had Won? Imagining a Constitutional World of Legislative Supremacy" 45 Indiana Law Review 41 (2011) https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/ilr/pdf/vol45p41.pdf asks what would have happened if Madison's proposal to give Congress a veto on all state laws had been adopted. I very much doubt that the Constitution would have been ratified in such a case, but let's assume it would be. LaCroix argues that "Had the negative been incorporated into the Constitution in 1787, the combined force of the negative’s distinctive characteristics and the precedent that it established in one constitutional controversy after another might ultimately have led not to the stronger union that Madison desired, but to forceful resistance to federal power by diverse state legislatures in a variety of circumstances. In contrast to Madison’s and many modern commentators’ understanding of the negative as a highly centralizing mechanism, then, the successful negative might potentially have led to fragmentation and disintegration between the federal center and the state peripheries decades before the sectional crisis ignited in the 1860s." (I don't see any "contrast" here; precisely because the Congressional negative was potentially so centralizing, it would lead to greater dissatisfaction in the states, and therefore possibly to disunionism earlier than the Constitution actually adopted did.)

LaCroix writes, "One can certainly tell an optimistic counterfactual story about a constitutional world with the negative. On this view, the negative might have staved off the sectional crisis, and perhaps even the Civil War, by establishing a clear rule of federal supremacy and staving off the expansion of slavery into the territories, and perhaps even the continuation of slavery where it existed. But one can also tell at least two more sinister stories. In one, the negative would have permitted slaveholding interests to have captured the federal level of government far more completely than the “slave power conspiracy” that periodically held the Court, the Senate, and the presidency was able to do, resulting in a federalization of proslavery views. A more diffusely pessimistic story suggests that whatever its substantive outcomes, the presence of the negative would have increased the salience of state sovereignty claims, creating more arenas of dispute between state and federal power, and perhaps uniting diverse states behind a broad banner of resistance to federal—or at least congressional—authority." With regard to the first "sinister" possibility, I wonder. Was there *ever* a House so pro-Southern that it would for example veto state laws providing for the freeing of slaves who were brought into the state for "transit or sojourn"? The Supreme Court was much more likely to do this than Congress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmon_v._New_York True, the House of 1853-54 or 1857-58 might veto some of the northern "personal liberty" laws--but again the Taney Court seems at least as likely to do that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ableman_v._Booth (Note that the simple failure of Congress to exercise its power to veto personal liberty laws would probably be cited as yet another justification of secession.)
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