From the NYT article:
“Everything we’ve tried to keep the federal government confined to rational limits has been a failure, an utter, unrelenting failure — so why not try something else?” said Thomas E. Woods Jr., a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a nonprofit group in Auburn, Ala., that researches what it calls “the scholarship of liberty. Mr. Woods, who has a Ph.D. in history, and has written widely on states’ rights and nullification — the argument that says states can sometimes trump or disregard federal law — said he was not sure where the dots between states’ rights and politics connected. But he and others say that whatever it is, something politically powerful is brewing under the statehouse domes."
"Other scholars say the state efforts, if pursued in the courts, would face formidable roadblocks. Article 6 of the Constitution says federal authority outranks state authority, and on that bedrock of federalist principle rests centuries of back and forth that states have mostly lost, notably the desegregation of schools in the 1950s and ’60s.
“Article 6 says that that federal law is supreme and that if there’s a conflict, federal law prevails,” said Prof. Ruthann Robson, who teaches constitutional law at the City University of New York School of Law. “It’s pretty difficult to imagine a way in which a state could prevail on many of these.”Thomas DiLorenzo disagrees with Prof Robson on the so-called “Supremacy Clause” of the Constitution:
"(Article 6) [of the Constitution] supposedly makes the federal government “supreme” at all times over the citizens of the states. Statist law professors may wish this were true, but it’s not. Federal law is only “supreme” with regard to the powers delegated to the central government by the sovereign states in Article I, Section 8. In his 1823 book, New Views of the Constitution, based partly on Robert Yates’s Secret Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention, a first-hand account of the convention by the New York chief justice that was published after his death, Senator John Taylor of Virginia stated: “[T]he expression in the constitution, ’shall be the supreme law of the land,’ is restricted by its limitations and reservation, and did not convey any species of supremacy to the government, going beyond the powers delegated or those reserved” (p. 78). "