State Right's
Government in the United States beyond the local level generally is held to be limited in its scope and divided in its structure. These constraints were expressly written into the country’s founding document, its Constitution, in response to perceived oppression by the British monarch and Parliament against whom the American colonists rebelled. The new system was to be a “compound republic” in which “the power surrendered by the people is … divided between two distinct governments;” first, a central national level to act on particular common concerns such as defense, and secondly, a diffused “state” level allowing citizens more immediate control over elected representatives. The details underlying this concept of “dual federalism” and its legal and political implications have been objects of serious contention for over two hundred years.
John D. Donahue in his book Disunited States reminds us that: “The Framers at Philadelphia launched not only a nation, but an appropriately endless argument over the proper balance between federal and state authority -- an argument whose intensity ebbs and flows and whose content evolves, but which is never really settled.”
The Articles of Confederation adopted in 1781 provided for only a feeble form of union, specifying at the start that “each state retains its sovereignty.” The central government’s economic authority was tightly constrained -- it could not collect taxes, regulate trade, or levy tariffs on imports -- and was largely mediated through the constituent states. There were several reasons behind this weakness. Officials in the separate states were jealous of their authority and resisted any hint of subordination. The English and Scottish political traditions in which most American intellectuals were steeped celebrated the radical new idea of limited government. Yet We The Apathetic People have over time allowed Washingtons career politicians to take them away and tax us to boot.
The Framers believed that the allocation of responsibility across levels of government would need to change with the times, and the Constitution sets broad parameters around the allowable division of powers between state and national governments. Within those limits, the Framers left it to the wisdom of their successors to find the right balance to fit the circumstances of the world to come and the priorities of future generation of Americans.
In our country’s early years the states enjoyed far more legitimacy than the distant national government. Washington’s rise in public esteem has been a 20th century phenomenon because of We The Apathetic People. The Depression, The New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement all tended to allow career politicians to detach popular loyalties from the states and move them toward Washington. A 1936 Gallup Poll found that 56 percent of Americans favored concentrating power in the federal government, while 44 percent favored state authority. Forty-one percent of respondents on a 1939 Roper Poll felt the federal government was “most honest and efficient in performing its own special duties.” The states came in last in the New Deal-era survey at 12 percent, with 17 percent awarding their confidence to local government. Talk about effective managed misperception of apathetic Americans!
Contemporary opinion surveys, by contrast, show dwindling faith in the federal government. In regular polls commissioned by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, the fraction of respondents identifying the federal government as “the level from which you feel you get the least for your money” rose by 10 points (to 46 percent) between 1989 and 1994 alone. Mid-1990s polls conducted by the Gallup Organization, the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, Business Week and the Harris Group, Hart and Teeter, and Princeton Survey Research Associates found, with striking consistency, support for enlarging the role of the states. Majorities of respondents -- often lopsided majorities -- favored state rather than federal leadership in education, crime control, welfare, job training, low income housing, highway construction, and farm policies. Late 1994 polling on trust in government among Missourians and Kansans found about a six-to-one advantage for the states. A bellweather poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates in 1995 for the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University found that by a margin of 61 to 24 percent, respondents trusted their state governments over the federal government to “do a better job of running things.” Most subgroups gave the edge to the states, including self-defined liberals (who favored the states by a margin of 49 to 36 percent), Democrats (48 percent to 35 percent), and voters under age thirty (72 to 21 percent).
Not just instinct and tradition, but some powerful logic as well, supports the ascendancy of the states. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis framed a resonant metaphor when he wrote that “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Isn’t it time We the Maids sweep in such a courageous laboratory to our states?
http://www.custommaidbook.com
John D. Donahue in his book Disunited States reminds us that: “The Framers at Philadelphia launched not only a nation, but an appropriately endless argument over the proper balance between federal and state authority -- an argument whose intensity ebbs and flows and whose content evolves, but which is never really settled.”
The Articles of Confederation adopted in 1781 provided for only a feeble form of union, specifying at the start that “each state retains its sovereignty.” The central government’s economic authority was tightly constrained -- it could not collect taxes, regulate trade, or levy tariffs on imports -- and was largely mediated through the constituent states. There were several reasons behind this weakness. Officials in the separate states were jealous of their authority and resisted any hint of subordination. The English and Scottish political traditions in which most American intellectuals were steeped celebrated the radical new idea of limited government. Yet We The Apathetic People have over time allowed Washingtons career politicians to take them away and tax us to boot.
The Framers believed that the allocation of responsibility across levels of government would need to change with the times, and the Constitution sets broad parameters around the allowable division of powers between state and national governments. Within those limits, the Framers left it to the wisdom of their successors to find the right balance to fit the circumstances of the world to come and the priorities of future generation of Americans.
In our country’s early years the states enjoyed far more legitimacy than the distant national government. Washington’s rise in public esteem has been a 20th century phenomenon because of We The Apathetic People. The Depression, The New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement all tended to allow career politicians to detach popular loyalties from the states and move them toward Washington. A 1936 Gallup Poll found that 56 percent of Americans favored concentrating power in the federal government, while 44 percent favored state authority. Forty-one percent of respondents on a 1939 Roper Poll felt the federal government was “most honest and efficient in performing its own special duties.” The states came in last in the New Deal-era survey at 12 percent, with 17 percent awarding their confidence to local government. Talk about effective managed misperception of apathetic Americans!
Contemporary opinion surveys, by contrast, show dwindling faith in the federal government. In regular polls commissioned by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, the fraction of respondents identifying the federal government as “the level from which you feel you get the least for your money” rose by 10 points (to 46 percent) between 1989 and 1994 alone. Mid-1990s polls conducted by the Gallup Organization, the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, Business Week and the Harris Group, Hart and Teeter, and Princeton Survey Research Associates found, with striking consistency, support for enlarging the role of the states. Majorities of respondents -- often lopsided majorities -- favored state rather than federal leadership in education, crime control, welfare, job training, low income housing, highway construction, and farm policies. Late 1994 polling on trust in government among Missourians and Kansans found about a six-to-one advantage for the states. A bellweather poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates in 1995 for the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University found that by a margin of 61 to 24 percent, respondents trusted their state governments over the federal government to “do a better job of running things.” Most subgroups gave the edge to the states, including self-defined liberals (who favored the states by a margin of 49 to 36 percent), Democrats (48 percent to 35 percent), and voters under age thirty (72 to 21 percent).
Not just instinct and tradition, but some powerful logic as well, supports the ascendancy of the states. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis framed a resonant metaphor when he wrote that “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Isn’t it time We the Maids sweep in such a courageous laboratory to our states?
http://www.custommaidbook.com
posted by Peter de Krassel's Custom Maid Politics at 9:25 AM
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