In his latest column, George F. Will pronounces Mike Huckabee’s candidacy ”appalling,” perhaps above all because Huckabee speaks ill of judicial supremacy, of which Will is increasingly fond. It must be said that Huckabee does not give the most artful or profound expression of opposition to the idea that Supreme Court decisions are “the supreme law of the land,” but it is certainly refreshing to hear someone at least make the attempt.

Will trots out old Orval Faubus and his opposition to desegregation of the Little Rock schools, a stand undone by President Eisenhower’s deployment of the 101st Airborne. For good measure he throws in the discredited Calhounian idea of “nullification.” But Mike Huckabee is not running for governor of Arkansas, an office he has already held. He’s running for president. And while Barack Obama has been very busy reminding us of all the ways that a president can violate the Constitution, it is good to be reminded that the Supreme Court too can violate the Constitution, and that the president and Congress are co-equal branches with their own responsibilities to defend the Constitution from judicial usurpations.

Governor Faubus’s defiance of the federal courts not only led to Eisenhower’s forceful response, it also produced a Supreme Court ruling in Cooper v. Aaron, complete with some myth-making in this famous passage:

Article VI of the Constitution makes the Constitution the “supreme Law of the Land.” In 1803, Chief Justice Marshall, speaking for a unanimous Court, referring to the Constitution as “the fundamental and paramount law of the nation,” declared in the notable case of Marbury v. Madison . . . that “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” This decision declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution, and that principle has ever since been respected by this Court and the Country as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system. It follows that the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment enunciated by this Court in the Brown case is the supreme law of the land . . .

Anyone who believes in the historical falsehood contained in this passage should consult Abraham Lincoln, who said this in his first inaugural address:

[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Mike Huckabee’s argument is a work in progress, but he has chosen Lincoln’s Constitution over the Warren Court’s. That’s a start.