  In the presence of Chern-Simons interactions the wave functionals of physical
states in 2+1-dimensional gauge theories vanish at anumber of nodal points. We
show that those nodes are located at some classical configurations which carry
a non-trivial magnetic charge. In abelian gauge theories this fact explains why
magnetic monopoles are suppressed by Chern-Simons interactions. In non-abelian
theories it suggests a relevant role for nodal gauge field configurations in
the confinement mechanism of Yang-Mills theories. We show that the vacuum nodes
correspond to the chiral gauge orbits of reducible gauge fields with
non-trivial magnetic monopole components.
