2008 in Review - States' Rights (August)

In the dog days, I found myself stewing over the demise of Federalism.  And I finally figured out who to blame.

I blame Orval Faubus.  And George Wallace.  And Strom Thurmond.  And the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.  And the rest of a generation and a half of unrepentent racist Cro-Magnons who used the power of the state to perpetuate the reprehensible notion that all men are not created equal.  

As World War II ended, the American people were confronted with too many proofs that race was no judge of character or conduct or competence.  But blacks were shunted to the back of the bus and barred from hotels and restaurants, given schools with no heat, no running water and no textbooks.

And when the courts and federal government stepped in to simply elevate the Negro to the status of “human,” those racist politicians croaked “state’s rights” So it’s them I blame.  FDR’s New Deal may have paved the way for a bloated federal bureaucracy, but it was the segregationists that made it permanent.  “State’s rights” - a concept actually enshrined in the Constitution - became a slur and the states have essentially been stripped of their sovereignty any time the federal government desired to act.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  So reads the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution, part of the original Bill of Rights - right up there with Freedom of Speech and the right to bear arms.  But the racist reactionaries of the South, and little ways beyond, reduced the Tenth Amendment to oblivion.

Our government now, as shown in every election cycle, is a national government.  Every issue is a national issue.  Congress and the courts intervene at will in the daily lives of citizens who have no more interstate connection than watching TV made in California and buying food shipped in from the Midwest.  As a result of the nationalization of everything, the real priorities of the federal government are constantly being routed around the local concerns of every district.

The usurpation of law-making authority by the federal government caused two problems.  The first is that the states are reduced to small subdivisions of the federal government, the people in those states stripped of any independent personality or quirky culture which might interfere with the way the federal government wants the country run.  If the people of Massachusetts want to eliminate public schools entirely, that’s their little experiment to run.  If the people of Louisiana think that the drinking age should be 16, why is that any concern of the federal government?  

If the people of California think that the national ecological policy is a recipe for toxic air, why should the federal government be allowed to insist on less stringent standards for pollution generated in that state?  That last is the red herring, since California has repeatedly created tougher standards for pollutants and tailpipe emissions - but it is the exception which proves the rule, because it so clearly chafes the federal government that every possible attempt at sovereignty is challenged on the grounds that the federal Supremacy Clause is threatened by California’s willingness to allow medicinal uses for marijuana or clean water rules.

The second problem is more insidious.  Our federal government is so absorbed in local politics that national policy is ignored.  For thirty-five years, we have needed a national energy policy.  We have no policy. 

We have no national education policy.  We have a cabinet-level department of education.  We have billions of dollars in education funds.  We have no national policy for what to do with that money.

And my argument would be that where you can’t find a national policy, you shouldn’t find the national government.  If we can reach no consensus on what the national education strategy should be, what the minimum national standards should be, then the federal government should get out of the education business entirely.

We have serious national issues to resolve.  A national energy policy.  A national policy on renewing the nation’s transportation infrastructure.  But we have a Congress devoted to bringing as much of the national money into each member’s district - bridges to nowhere, museums of the most purely local interest, bicycle trails around town.

Tip O’Neill said that “all politics is local.”  National politics shouldn’t be.  The people of Petaluma, California don’t want their federal tax dollars being spent on a skateboard park in Lima, Ohio.  And vice versa.  But that is where a ludicrous amount of effort in Congress is directed.

Finally, because all issues are national issues, all elections become national elections - and all national elections become local elections.  Whether any individual member of Congress is for or against abortion should be as wholly irrelevant as whether any individual city council member is opposed to the war in Iraq.  More often that it is used, the phrase “it’s not your damn job” should be heard in politics.