Federalism and state's rights

[Pappa]

Why would those "massive distances" matter, rEvo?

It takes a lot less time today to travel from Sydney to Perth than it took to travel 100 kms a century ago.

My experience in the UK suggests that people care a lot more about what happens locally than nationally. This can lead to nimbyism, but also ensures that some MPs and local councillors are focused on issues that affect the people who vote for them.

The above ignores the effects of general (national) elections. During general elections, people are only swayed by policing, the NHS and nowadays immigration.

[mistermack]

Why would those "massive distances" matter, rEvo?

It takes a lot less time today to travel from Sydney to Perth than it took to travel 100 kms a century ago.

My experience in the UK suggests that people care a lot more about what happens locally than nationally. This can lead to nimbyism, but also ensures that some MPs and local councillors are focused on issues that affect the people who vote for them.

The above ignores the effects of general (national) elections. During general elections, people are only swayed by policing, the NHS and nowadays immigration.

I disagree. I think they are swayed by firstly personality of the leader, second economics, and thirdly by the media telling them what to think.
Immigration might explain some of the support for ukip, I guess. But I think Ukip is mainly boosted by the right-wing newspapers and their constant anti-EC tirades.
But as far as the main parties go, I think most people think that they are all the same on immigration. They talk tough but have no intention of doing anything.

[klr]

I suspect that our current federal/state/local government tripod of quarrelling power will remain with us for a long, long time.

Historical inertia is hard to shift, whether useful or not...

Wise words indeed.

[Seth]

I suspect that our current federal/state/local government tripod of quarrelling power will remain with us for a long, long time.

Historical inertia is hard to shift, whether useful or not...

Wise words indeed.

It's actually intended to be that way, even down under. It's explicitly supposed to be that way here in the US. Our system was quite carefully designed to LIMIT the power of the central government by devolving all power and authority not expressly granted to Congress by the Constitution itself, to the states, or to the people themselves.

The perversion of the Commerce Clause is what has allowed this monstrous and hideously intrusive strong federal government to emerge and metastasize in the cancer that's killing out nation.

A simple amendment to the Commerce Clause would fix this and return the bulk of power to the states and the people, where it belongs.

The whole point of this structure is to create inertia in the central government system that keeps it from drifting to and fro with the winds of social popularity and public sentiment. Congress is supposed to move slowly and deliberately and NOT react to the emotions of public sentiment, because history shows us that governments that pander to popular opinion do not function well and often become tyrannical and despotic.

The power of alacrity in government is SUPPOSED to remain with the state and local governments, which are close to the issues that affect the people who live within those jurisdictional boundaries and whose representatives are more accountable to and under the direct control of the citizens of the community.

We don't need a federal central government trying to make local zoning and land use decisions.

[Blind groper]

To Seth

By coincidence, I was chatting to an American tourist here in NZ just yesterday, and his opinion is that the Federal government of the USA was hamstrung by the dual nature of the party system. What the Democrats did, the Republicans reversed and vice versa. This guy believed that the hamstringing of the central government was a very bad thing and prevented real constructive change in America.

[Seth]

To Seth

By coincidence, I was chatting to an American tourist here in NZ just yesterday, and his opinion is that the Federal government of the USA was hamstrung by the dual nature of the party system. What the Democrats did, the Republicans reversed and vice versa. This guy believed that the hamstringing of the central government was a very bad thing and prevented real constructive change in America.

He's an idiot. The very best thing that can possibly happen in Washington is legislative gridlock. The less Congress can get done, the less Congress can fuck with our rights and liberties.

It was designed that way. If you can't convince members from both side to agree on something, then you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

That's also why we have "states rights." Congress is made up of representatives of the states, not monarchs. The system WAS intended to put a check on Congress by having Senators elected by the state legislatures to represent the interests of the states while the House of Representatives were to be directly elected by the people to represent their interests.

That all changed with the Seventeenth Amendment, enacted in 1913, during the height of Progressivism, which mandated popular election of Senators.

This changed the entire structure of our central government, quite deliberately by the way, and marginalized the powers and authorities of state legislatures by removing their voice in Congress and replacing it with yet another body subject to popular opinion. The result is that rather than serving the concerns of the individual states over arrogations of power by the federal government that diminished the role of the states, Senators now serve partisan political issues that are on the minds of the voters.

And that has turned out to be a very, very bad thing for the states and their resident's freedoms and rights.

[Blind groper]

That reflects your generally anarchist views, Seth.

My own view is that government exists for a purpose, and needs to be able to fulfil that purpose. Obstructing government is the same as obstructing progress.

Mind you, that assessment is based on the assumption that the government is like the one we have in NZ. It does not take into account total idiocy as in Tony Abbott of Australia, or corruption, as in the USA.

[Seth]

That reflects your generally anarchist views, Seth.

I don't have an anarchist view, I have a Libertarian view and I believe in the checks and balances set up by the Founders, which worked quite well for more than 150 years, until the Supreme Court decided that it was the determiner of the constitutionality of the Constitution. That's when it all started to go to hell in a hand basket.

My own view is that government exists for a purpose, and needs to be able to fulfil that purpose.

Of course it does. And it's purpose is to secure the rights of individuals against the predation of collectivism.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (Emphasis added)

Obstructing government is the same as obstructing progress.

That depends entirely on the nature and practices of the particular government you're referring to.

Mind you, that assessment is based on the assumption that the government is like the one we have in NZ. It does not take into account total idiocy as in Tony Abbott of Australia, or corruption, as in the USA.

The mistake you make is in thinking that nothing will ever change for you and that you run no risk of getting a government that you don't like even a little bit. Our Founders were wise enough to understand that things change, and that government is like fire. Useful and beneficial in small doses properly controlled and constrained, and a raging, destructive maelstrom of hideous and unstoppable proportions if it gets out of control.

In acknowledging that risk, our Founders set up a system with an interconnected and interdependent series of checks and balances to keep government firmly under the control of the governed and subject to their consent.

The 2nd most important check and balance is the very structure of our Republic, which is comprised of sovereign states working together through a federal government, but without abdicating the essential aspects of state sovereignty other than those explicit powers and duties granted to the Congress, which itself is made up of representatives of the states, one house being elected by the people of the states, and the other being appointed by the legislatures of the states.

Election of the Senate by the legislatures of the states was intended to, as I said, represent the sovereign interests of the states themselves in the legislative process, precisely so that attempts to intrude on state sovereignty by the House of Representatives would be checked and subjected to the most careful, sober and yes, time-consuming deliberation. The precise intent was to slow down the process of federal lawmaking so that the whims and caprices of the public, swayed by events of the moment, would have a circuit-breaker that would force slow, deliberate examination of the proposed law in order to avoid precisely what we see today, where Senators pander to voters rather than protecting the sovereignty of the states against federal intrusions.

The Department of Education is a prime example of what happens when the sovereignty of the states is violated by a Congress pandering to public opinion. The Department of Education began as a research project to investigate and determine best-practice methods of education in order to assist the states in educating their teachers, many of whom had no formal education themselves, so that students in the ubiquitous one-room schoolhouses across the nation would have teachers who knew how to teach. It was never intended to be a regulatory agency, it was quite simply an advisory agency that was supposed to publish suggestions and recommendations to the state legislatures that could be used by the states to create effective education systems at the state level.

There is absolutely no Constitutional authority whatsoever for the federal government to operate an agency that in any way regulates education in the states. Not even one iota of authority. It did not even exist as a distinct cabinet-level agency until 1979, and was merely a non-cabinet level office from 1867 to 1972.

Jimmy Carter signed the bill creating the Department of Education, which was previously part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, a cabinet-level department NOT created by Congress, but created under a mix of codified and non-codified federal regulations and laws, which many legal scholars argue was not an authorized constitutional activity to begin with.

Thus, the claim of unconstitutionality of the current Department of Education.

What we see is that a minor office intended to assist the states in creating their own school systems has transmogrified into a giant, bloated federal bureaucracy that is now transparent in its attempts to impose federal curricula on the states through Common Core regulations, which themselves have been authored by...wait for it...Frankfurt School Neo-Marxists like Bill Ayers, among many others. Frankfurt School Neo-Marxists came to the US in 1935, where it affiliated with, wonder of wonders, Columbia University, a then-hotbed of Marxist thought that now pervades a large number of institutions of higher education in America today.

This metastasizing cancer of Marxism and Neo-Marxism in our universities, and now in our public schools through the advent of Common Core federally-controlled curricula that is deeply Marxist in it's teachings and attempts to influence the thoughts and behaviors of our youngsters.

Nor is this accidental. Neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School persuasion understood that Marxist revolution a la Marx or Castro was not highly effective. They saw this in the failed first Russian Revolution. So they concluded, and not incorrectly, that the only way to achieve the Marxist goals was to play the long game and inculcate Marxist propaganda into students from a very young age. Long-term indoctrination...generational indoctrination in fact, is their methodology, and may well be entering it's endgame stage with Common Core. The purpose of Common Core is to drive the regulation of education into the federal sphere, thus eliminating state control of education, thus allowing the Neo-Marxists in the federal government to control what children are taught. Even today we see that civics is no longer taught, and the teaching of the Constitution and Bill of Rights is so abysmally infrequent that the Congress actually passed a federal law requiring schools to teach the Constitution ONE DAY A YEAR.

So when I refer to Marxist conspiracies, I'm not making them up. They exist, they are very real and very dangerous to our Republic and to our fundamental rights. But they are also very carefully concealed from the public, and people here who refuse to do the necessary research to see the truth.

So, when I see Marxism, I identify it as Marxism precisely because Marxists don't want to be identified as Marxists. The first rule of Marxist indoctrination is "never talk about Marxist indoctrination." Just change the name to "liberal" or "Progressive" or "democrat" or "democratic socialist" or anything that sounds good, but is still Marxism. And when a term takes on the taint of Marxism because it IS Marxism, then change the name and keep right on "progressing" towards the Marxist goal.

[Tyrannical]

US Federalism died when through Judicial fiat the bill of rights was applied to the States, something that was never intended. It's application almost totally gutted the protections State's enjoyed from Federal encroachment guaranteed by the tenth amendment that separated Federal and State power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporat ... _of_Rights

[Seth]

US Federalism died when through Judicial fiat the bill of rights was applied to the States, something that was never intended. It's application almost totally gutted the protections State's enjoyed from Federal encroachment guaranteed by the tenth amendment that separated Federal and State power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporat ... _of_Rights

No, I disagree. I think incorporation was always contemplated. The Constitution requires that every state have a "republican" form of government, which when combined with other language clearly indicates that the fundamental rights enunciated in the Bill of Rights were to be universally applied to all citizens of the United States equally. If that were not the case, then one state could become a monarchy, one a socialist, one an oligarchy, one a tyranny.

The rights expressed in the BOR are not expressed as "federal" rights, they are expressed as universal natural rights which must therefore logically supersede both federal and state regulation.

What annoys me is that "incorporation" was done piecemeal when it should have obviously been done all at once. I'm specifically referring to the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms, which has been left out of the principle of incorporation for a very long time, right up until Heller.

My take on what's allowed the federal government to overwhelm the states is not incorporation, but the interpretation of the Commerce Clause that allows Congress to "regulate" commerce that does not actually cross state lines. I think that was a gross overreach by the Supreme Court of an authority that was clearly contemplated as a way for Congress to prevent and resolve conflicts over the movement of goods and persons among the several states, "among" meaning "passing between."

The concept that Congress has the authority to regulate any commerce that even theoretically might "affect" interstate commerce is pernicious and completely opposed to the very concept of the sovereignty of the states with respect to activities within a state that do not cross state lines.

If we amend the Commerce Clause only slightly, we can eliminate 90 percent of the federal government, and it's regulatory authority, literally overnight. All we need to do is amend it to say that Congress' ONLY role in regulating commerce among the several states is limited to, and only to, resolving disputes about the movement of items of commerce across state lines, provided that those disputes are brought to it by the legislatures of the states involved. That was supposed to be Congress' role in the first place, as an arbiter between the competing states, which at the time the Bill of Rights was enacted, had a tendency to impose taxes and tariffs on goods from one state passing into or through the state, which interfered with the union of states by making them more separate nations than a union of states.

[Brian Peacock]

Interesting, Brian. However, there is a possibility that the complexity and friction within such a system, although inefficient, makes sure that authoritarian decision making is actually restricted in a useful way...

Possibly. Yet in our case I don't those those frictions in the system are necessarily, or primarily structural - even with the UK's constitutional settlement is anachronistic, uncodified, and basically still rooted in pre-industrial era thinking - but more to do with the basic psychology of over-reaching and over-eager political aspirants. The sort of people who really want to lead, and who really think that the force of their personality is a reflection of their personal virtue and the merit of their ideas, are not really the sort of people who are interested in admin - or should even be given too much responsibility. IMO the role of the executive is primarily functional and not to give a moral lead, and our current crop seems rather over-endowed with a conviction borne of the latter and rather ill-equipped when it comes to the former.

[JimC]

Interesting, Brian. However, there is a possibility that the complexity and friction within such a system, although inefficient, makes sure that authoritarian decision making is actually restricted in a useful way...

Possibly. Yet in our case I don't those those frictions in the system are necessarily, or primarily structural - even with the UK's constitutional settlement is anachronistic, uncodified, and basically still rooted in pre-industrial era thinking - but more to do with the basic psychology of over-reaching and over-eager political aspirants. The sort of people who really want to lead, and who really think that the force of their personality is a reflection of their personal virtue and the merit of their ideas, are not really the sort of people who are interested in admin - or should even be given too much responsibility. IMO the role of the executive is primarily functional and not to give a moral lead, and our current crop seems rather over-endowed with a conviction borne of the latter and rather ill-equipped when it comes to the former.

A psychological tendency of would-be politicians in many cases, I suspect; and not a useful one...

[Tyrannical]

You're wrong Seth. The Bill of Rights were limits placed on the Federal Government PERIOD. The various State Constitutions placed limits on State and local governments. It was a blatant power gran by the Federal judiciary

[Warren Dew]

US Federalism died when through Judicial fiat the bill of rights was applied to the States, something that was never intended. It's application almost totally gutted the protections State's enjoyed from Federal encroachment guaranteed by the tenth amendment that separated Federal and State power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporat ... _of_Rights

The bill of rights was purposely incorporated against the states in the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th amendment. The Supreme Court has just been slow in recognizing the clause.

[JimC]

In the US, how do the states raise money for government spending?

In Oz, they get a certain amount from local state duties and taxes, and also via federal funds deriving from our Goods and Services tax.