What’s healthier: a strong, centralized government or more autonomy for states? This debate has been with us since the inception of the nation when Thomas Jefferson (who often referred to Virginia as his “country”) and Alexander Hamilton engaged in epic intellectual slugfests.
But none of the Founding Fathers — federalist or non — could have imagined the size, scope or reach of today’s central government.
History and time also has dissuaded most Americans of the notion — if your life happens to be unfortunate enough to ponder such things regularly — that they reside in a “voluntary association” of states.
Most likely, we had at one point hit the sweet spot for the distribution of these two competing powers, but today federal government has undoubtedly won the battle. And, worse, we now find ourselves on a trajectory that could render states superfluous in anything but name.
It starts with the purse strings. If states don’t control their own money, they don’t control their own policy. Beginning in earnest in the 1970s, Washington began to blackmail states with highway funding and other dollars to institute national safety regulations. States, unable to walk away from millions (remember when “millions” meant something?), had little choice but to play ball.
Today, the states’ fiscal burden is never much in question in Washington, apart from how much of a payoff will be needed in the legislative sausage-making. When the ever-growing entitlement programs are factored in — many of which were first estimated to take only a slim bite of local budgets and now eat hearty chunks — the state budget effectively shrinks. Entitlements, like the newly passed health-care reform legislation, will add exponentially crippling costs (remember how hard Nebraska’s Ben Nelson worked to avoid these expenses?)
Even without this added outlay, California is facing a massive shortfall. New York, Arizona and a host of states are grappling with unsustainable budgets. Unless there is a historic recovery, it is only a matter of time before they require bailouts. The Recovery Act, in fact (formerly known as the stimulus bill), was often allocated to backfill state budgets. During the early stages of the stimulus, a Government Accounting Office report found that the “Treasury had outlayed about $29 billion of the estimated $49 billion in Recovery Act funds projected for use in states and localities in fiscal year 2009.”
This means escalating control by Washington. It corrodes the sovereignty of states, where there is still a legal responsibility to be prudent with tax dollars. Unlike Washington, Colorado can neither print money nor run its operation on a deficit, nor carry around massive debt.
The most tangible policy issue that highlights this loss of control is education. When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he promised to shut down the Department of Education, arguing that the issue was the bailiwick of locals. But by 2001, a Republican president, George W. Bush, was championing a hyper-centralized Washington role in local education — increasing the Department’s budget 70 percent between 2002 and 2004. Today, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition hands out an additional $4.35 billion in “incentive” money (funded by the Recovery Act) to states that most closely adhere to the reforms favored by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the president.
Whether you believe reforms are constructive or not is not the point. You may feel differently once another party is in control.
Education is but one example. The Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights states that, “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.” James Madison declared that this allowed the citizen “double security” when it came to their rights.
Yet, each year we have people railing against vital institutions like the Electoral College — which allows smaller states to avoid ending up on the lower end of a caste system — and rallying for “direct democracy,” which dilutes the strength of local voices.
Today, in fact, anyone who asserts a state’s rights is risking being portrayed as a KKK-loving troglodyte. States’ rights, we are told, are only “code words” for racism. And it is inarguable we are dealing with some unsightly history, particularly in the South, where independence from Washington was used as an excuse to undermine the freedoms of others. But, then again, arguing that the 10th amendment is useless because it was misused is like arguing that the First Amendment is useless because Nazis are allowed to march in Skokie.
More significantly, states are for the most part organic. They are geographically, culturally, socially and economically unique. Road rules in Nevada don’t make sense in New York City. Gun laws in Portland aren’t made for Muskogee. New Englanders won’t want the high school textbooks of Texans and Coloradans won’t want the energy policy of West Virginia. Power changes hands, and so does the focus of Washington.
So the continued growth of central power should be concerning to all. Because each time we are mandated or cajoled to cede to the wishes of Washington, we are surrendering our rights today, and tomorrow.
E-mail David Harsanyi at dharsanyi@denverpost.com and follow him on Twitter at .
