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Confessions of a Right Wing Nut: Federalism
In the process of thinking through the issues of the day, I often find myself going back to first principles and re-examining my premises to ensure that I am not being a ranting right wing nut out of habit, or just for the sheer contrarian fun of it. The issue today that seems to apply to so many of our debates is Federalism.
Federalism, in its most well known version, says that only those powers explicitly granted to the federal government in the Constitution can be properly exercised by the federal government. All other functions and decisions of government are properly exercised at the state or local level. Although having fallen into disrepute, this is in fact explicitly stated in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, was repeatedly emphasized by the founders during the debates over ratifying the Constitution, and was more or less accepted as a fact of governmental life (even with the Fourteenth Amendment) until after World War II. At that point the Supreme Court and invasive federal bureaucracies slowly and methodically shredded the concept. Today the Tenth Amendment lies limp and ignored, and nobody in Washington outside of the Cato Institute seems to take the notion seriously any more.
Well, those of us who are right wing nuts in the hinterlands still take it mighty seriously. In keeping with the right approach to examining these sorts of issues, we need to understand Federalism in two contexts: why it is crucial to the maintenance of democracy, properly understood, and why it tends to result in better policy making.
Federalism as a key component of republican democracy reflects the fundamental (and one would think commonsense) principle that democracy works effectively only to the extent that it is close to home. The farther away and more distant decisions are made, the less likely we are to be willing or able to have an impact on those decisions. Conversely, understanding the impact on the people of decisions is feasible only if those making the decisions are close to home. If I don’t like local school board policy, I can show up at the school board meeting to discuss it. If I catch my state rep in the grocery store, I can buttonhole her and make sure she understands my concerns about light rail. If I think we are overtaxed, I can join thousands of my fellow Minnesotans (as I will this weekend) down at the state capitol to let the state government know precisely how we feel. But if I don’t think the mud puddle in the back yard qualifies as a wetland, I can….what? If I sincerely disagree with legalized abortion, I can… write feeble letters to the editor? In order for democracy to work as designed, the levers of power must be within the reach of the average citizen. The farther away we move the levers the weaker democracy becomes in practice.
Federalism, contrary to popular liberal mythology, also significantly increases the chances at arriving at correct policy decisions. Wait!, some will howl, we fought a Civil war over the notion of states rights. If we hadn’t reined the concept in we never would have gotten rid of Jim Crow or school segregation. To which I answer – of course we would have! The only possible difference federalizing these issues made was to speed the process up a little bit. What made segregation disappear was not the Supreme Court, it was social and demographic changes that rendered it archaic and meaningless. The Supreme Court just forced the issue a little bit. But at what cost?
The unspoken premise of liberal anti-federalism is that there is one right answer to most of the questions that vex us. Further, the people assumed to have those right answers just happen to reside in Washington, D.C. Abortion? One right answer. The Environment? One right answer. Transportation? You get the idea. Modern policy debate becomes little more than an exercise in finding the right combination of power-brokers to impose the one right answer. Not only is this inherently undemocratic, the inertia of large government almost mandates that the decision imposed be continued forever. No matter how stupid the idea, we are stuck with it. All of us. Federalism, by contrast, assumes that there may be more than one right answer. If the good people of New York want to legalize abortion, so be it. If the good people of Oklahoma think it ought to be illegal, so be it. These are decisions that reflect the attitudes and opinions of the people of those states. Why is this a horrific notion? By allowing the multitude of social and legal questions that lie outside the guarantees of the Constitution to be decided by the states, we actively encourage the experimentation of ideas. States that get the right answers will attract people and businesses, while states with bad answers will, over time, pay the price. As a nation, we will do a much better job of comparing issues and ideas and in the end will be a much smarter populace.
Could there be abuse? Sure. Just as there can be abuse at the national level. The only difference is that abuses at the national level become the perpetual "one right answer", while those at the state level become occasional anomalies about which the population can "vote with their feet".
The practice of federalism is a fundamental piece of the process of democracy. Anti-federalism may occasionally arrive at a truly "right answer", but in the process fundamentally damages the workings of democracy, and if democracy goes, it won’t matter how good our answers are.