Forum Post: States' rights as it's conceived now doesn't work; please don't push for "reforms" that are only going to make things worse.
Posted 12 years ago on Dec. 4, 2011, 5:35 a.m. EST by ARod1993
(2420)
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Local governments might be able to successfully handle a great deal of autonomy, but honestly speaking state governments have a penchant for inertia, corruption, and general incompetence that most supporters of hardcore states' rights either aren't familiar with or would prefer to gloss over. Let me give you a few case studies to illustrate what I mean:
New York (my home state) has had three state senators arrested by the FBI on corruption charges (including money laundering) in four months, and a state assemblyman arrested twice in less than a year for similar charges. We also had a state legislator who figured it was cool to beat his wife and then cover for it and Paterson trying to squelch one of his aides over a sexual assault incident, and that's just the stuff over which charges have been brought. Hell, we even sent Spitzer up to Albany to clean things up only to see him booted right back down because he couldn't keep it in his damn pants.
The Empire State is hardly alone; New Jersey's been a mess for God only knows how long. Just Google Operation Bid Rig and you'll see exactly what I mean; 44 people, many of them elected state officials, wound up getting hauled into court (and in many cases convicted) of crap that's not just beyond corrupt but also just plain stupid. On top of all this it's coming out that Jon Corzine's getting raked over the coals over about a billion dollars in missing funds from a hedge fund he ran.
And now I'd like to invite any smug Republicans blaming these debacles on the inherent corruptibility of liberals rather than the dysfunctionality of state governments to fly over eastern North Carolina, home to an unbelievable volume of pig crap (quite literally). Essentially most of eastern North Carolina stinks to high heaven because of hundreds of millions of gallons of pig crap from factory farms is being let to marinate in open-air lagoons and/or sprayed into the air as an aerosol. It's actually gotten to the point of ruining something like nine or ten waterways and causing China-esque air quality problems. North Carolina's only beginning to attack the problem now and it's so little so late that who knows if it'll work?
Finally, who can forget Texas? It's home to (among other things) a completely toothless home contractor fraud regulatory board that charges massive fees to investigate fraud, has no power whatsoever, was created at the behest of one of the worst offenders, and is generally staffed by the buddies of said offenders. What really takes the cake, though, is the leaky nuclear waste dump in Andrews County that happens to be sitting on the aquifer that provides drinking water to seven different states.
My point here is that for every outrageous incident of corruption in DC I can pick fifty or sixty from the various state capitals, and I'd rather worry about cleaning one house with 536 people in it than fifty with different traditions and procedures and God only knows how many different officials. Wouldn't you?
"I'd rather worry about cleaning one house with 536 people in it than fifty with different traditions and procedures and God only knows how many different officials. Wouldn't you?"
Not really... I can move to a different state. I cant move to a different America.
The incompetence of state government you mention (I would venture to say) exists solely due to a bloated, runaway federal level government that blatantly ignores the tenth amendment of the US constitution. I like how you site very specific instances of 'corruption' at the state level but ignore the fact that 536 people cooperatively disregard the document that all of them swore to uphold and protect... Including our President.
Incidentally, to those who say that New Mexico complaining and trying to regulate what goes on in Texas is un-American, l disagree. In fact, I would say that New Mexico trying to regulate things going on in Texas that affect them is about as American as you can get. The reason the American colonists revolted in the first place was that Britain was making decisions about their quality of life in a forum in which these colonists had no say.
The basic American doctrine is that nobody gets to do things that affect how we live our lives without at least consulting us about it. When Texas decides that it's going to plop a leaky nuclear waste dump on top of an aquifer providing drinking water to six other states, the American thing to do is to call bullshit; a man whom these people never had the opportunity to vote against has essentially decided that they should be drinking radioactive water via a process in which they have no say. Now, I don't know about you, but that sure sounds like an Intolerable Act to me...
Here's the thing; blanket generalizations about disregarding the Constitution aren't going to sway me unless you provide me with specific examples, and quite honestly the whole point of the "necessary and proper" clause is to give the federal government the ability to step in when fifty states acting unilaterally will not be sufficient to get things done quickly and efficiently enough to meet the oncoming challenge. Those situations were assumed to include defense, collective debt, currency, and trade, since the 1790s and until the Gilded Age that was really enough. Since that time, especially considering the advent of multinational corporations, I would argue that corporate regulations and labor law, and environmental quality issues fall under that umbrella as well.
As far as the idea that you can move to a different state but not a different America, that doesn't make much sense. You can't move to a different Wisconsin or Texas any more than you can move to a different America, and you can in fact move to a different nation should you choose and should you be willing to expend the effort to do so.
Also, your comment about state incompetence being due to increasing assumption of responsibility by the feds is simply false. Corruption at the state level has been a part of our government from at least the 1840s on and probably earlier; the move to direct election of senators came about because blatant cronyism in the state houses was keeping the people's choices out of the running far too often. Men like Boss Tweed were a thriving part of state governments in the Gilded Age (when the Feds tended to let things run themselves) and I in fact would argue that the trend toward a bigger, farther-reaching federal government was a product of state corruption and the popular disgust thereof rather than the other way around.