Our deep divisions may have started with the discarding of states’ rights.
The tragedy in Tucson has once again exposed the raw nerve of political posturing.
By now, conservatives must surely be getting accustomed to finding themselves in the “crosshairs” of blame for every conceivable misfortune.
Indeed, the predictable reaction from the most partisan of liberals is nothing new — considering who was pointing fingers after Oklahoma City, politicizing the Wellstone memorial and blaming the Interstate 35W bridge collapse on “no new taxes.”
Anyone starting to see a trend here?
Yet as sad and pathetic as tying the rantings of a schizophrenic to your political opponents may be, there is no denying one thing. America is a divided nation. And if anything constructive can come out of Arizona’s pain, it might well be a national discussion as to how we became so polarized.
People have always had differing views on the proper size of government in a free society. In the modern era, however, we have abandoned the live-and-let-live philosophy of federalism for the one-size-fits-all vision of consolidated power.
The result is a spoils system bordering on mob rule by allowing Leviathan government to impose its will on the rest of the country. This is the antithesis of republican architecture.
James Madison wrote of the new central government he helped create that it could not “be deemed a national one since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several states, a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.”
In short, the genius of the framers was to craft a system of governance that would account for the diversity of human beings by allowing separate jurisdictions — known as states — to compete for the governed.
A republic embraces a division of power that emphasizes local control “extended over a large region.”
It is neither a monarchy nor a democracy, but a filtered majority, refined through representation and constrained by the separation of powers. The most important division of power, expressed in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, is vertical in nature, distinguishing federal and state authority.
Why is this important?
Because the most divisive issues of our time are no longer being decided by everyday citizens crafting the laws under which they live, but by a federal behemoth overstepping its constitutional boundaries.
For instance, while the Civil War amendments were appropriately designed to eradicate all forms of state racial preferences, they were not (contrary to a century of judicial activism) meant to “incorporate” federal review over every imaginable dispute.
Most of those issues — from religion to education to crime and punishment — fell squarely under the power of the states to police the law.
At the same time, the federal power to regulate commerce among the states was never intended to nationalize control over the economy.
Indeed, the federal health care law (Obamacare for the unpersuaded) itself now rests tenuously on the twin posts of an elastic commerce clause and a bizarre view (hatched at a cocktail party during the New Deal) of an unlimited federal taxing and spending power.
Believe it or not, there was a time when state tax burdens were of greater concern to the average worker than the federal one. The demise of fiscal federalism has conclusively put an end to that.
The point is this: If residents of any given state want to bail out business, subsidize health care, and legalize abortion and gay marriage, let them do it. As long as every other state is free to enact the opposite policy.
In 1962, it was President John F. Kennedy who (perhaps unwittingly) reminded a nation on the doorstep of expanding centralized power, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Breaking up the monopoly in Washington may be the surest way to diffuse today’s political hostilities. But that of course would require the most progressive of pundits to stand down on the issue of national government and in the process rediscover the virtue of exactly what they’ve demonized for so long: states’ rights.
Published in the Star Tribune, January 22, 2011
