Federalism is one of the strengths that makes the United States different than other countries. In my observation, confederations do not work. Europe is either going to disintegrate or integrate more. There are of course, conflicting camps in Europe, but as the current crisis with the Euro is showing, the status quo cannot stand. I personally think the odds are 65% towards an integration at a financial level within 5-15 years. The other 30% chance most likely possibility to me is the creation of a ‘probation’ status for some nations, removing their ability to print their own Euro’s, and I just don’t see that working. More than likely any nation placed on such a status will remove itself from the EU.
Federalism is woven into the United States on every level, even its name. There are many progressives who believe the time has come to dissolve state governments. When I look at the state government of MY state, I can’t blame them. Even when Republicans control every element of state government, they can’t get any work done on real issues. They barely managed to repeal the stupid blue law prohibiting Sunday sales of alcohol, but they have done nothing to resolve critical issues of education, transportation and water, much less doing anything meaningful to fix the economy.
This is not a praise of Democrats. They did little while they were in power. In fact for the entire duration of while I’ve been here, I have had little but contempt for all but a small handful of state politicians.
The same story is repeated over and over again in other states like Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Iowa, Kansas etc. States spend more time catering to their rabid psychotic base than they do trying to fix real issues. I have nothing but contempt for the ‘both sides are equal’ mantra, but in this case I will say that the democrats have real problems too. When I got my state pest control license in California it was a nightmare. When they put a tax lien on me for a the income I supposedly MIGHT have earned (even though I was out of state) it took TEN YEARS of dealing with the labyrinth that was their state to deal with it. And while some progress has been shown recently (now that it doesn’t take TWO THIRDS MAJORITY to pass a budget (an idiotic idea approved and repeatedly approved by the voters until they finally realized why it doesn’t work) the democrats are still so wedded to their support of public unions that they refuse to decriminalize a host of issues due to the lobbying of the state prison guards. This, despite the fact that their prisons are the worst in the nation, and have been ordered by the Supreme Court to lessen their population. And I say this as someone who supports the idea of unions and even public employees unions. California is MESSED UP.
But the Federal government is no better. I’ll be tearing it apart enough in subsequent posts without a need to go into detail but everyone who is not in the Village knows that Washington stopped functioning long ago. Exactly when that was varies depending on what reality you observe and how conservative you are, but everyone agrees that it is broken.
But if the Federal government is broken (and it is) how would making the states go away or replacing them with ‘regional districts’ make things any better?
Answer: It wouldn’t.
Having said that, I think the Romans had the right idea. When their empire started to decay, they moved the capital. This renewal kept them around as the Roman Empire for another few centuries and as the Byzantines for another 1000 years after that.
After a certain amount of time, a government just begins to become corrupt. The corridors and levers of power ossify and need to be shaken up. All the more reason then, for an entirely new Constitution.
But on top of that, I believe that we are too fixated on the borders of states. We need states. And states should be as powerful (if not MORE powerful) than they currently are. But there are some problems with states as they are, that go way beyond their utterly broken and useless state legislatures. One of these is the tendency in multiple states for one part of the state to loot the rest of the state for their own benefit. In Georgia, the rural parts of the state loot the Atlanta Tax base without providing any meaningful report in return. Due to Republican and rural opposition to Marta, it has to go hat in hand to the state legislature to use its own money. In California, the South loots the North. The Cities loot the Suburbs. In Illinois, Chicago dominates the state entire state. In New York, the private prison cities jack up the severity of the laws to incarcerate and kidnap citizens of New York City to maintain their local populations. In North Carolina, there has been feuding between the mountains and the flat lands for as long as the state has existed.
How do you solve this problem equitably?
My solution is to allow residents to create their own state. There have to be rules to this, but I believe it could work. You do it by predefined regions roughly along the lines of Zip Codes. Every 20 years, people get to vote on which state they want their ‘zip code’ to be a part of. The state has to be a line of continuous unbroken territory. It has to have a minimum population (at least enough to have 1 representative in the House of Representatives or whatever body represents population) and it has to have a State Constitution that at least 60% of the members of that prospective state approve.
I think this could best be accomplished by having a select set of state packages, such as “Georgia” or “Atlanta” or “North Georgia” etc. These packages would include boundaries and a proposed constitution to include those boundaries. You would vote for your preferred border set, and then approve or reject the proposed constitution for each package in a separate section of the ballot.
The default would be the status quo. Yes, that means you could keep things the same by rejecting all existing new constitutions, but on the other hand if a zip code was sufficiently motivated to leave a state and set up their own state, or even just jump over to the nearby bordering state, they stand a better chance of doing it.
There are some problems with this. Poor areas or minority areas would try to be removed from richer states. This could be countered with greater federal subsidies (which would be more possible in a new constitution). Radical constitutions would potentially be snuck by people, but honestly, given the fact that our current constitution is routinely ignored and candidates lie all the time, I don’t see much difference. At some point voters need to take responsibility for their own actions.
Such a radical reconfiguration of the way states work would, in my opinion, not be possible with a simple amendment. It would be legal (I checked) but it would greatly confuse the issue and allow previous precedent regarding states to interfere with the new process. A lot of things can be fixed with simple amendments but I believe the ability to let people choose their own states would not be possible without a total reboot of the constitution, which is, I believe, my strongest argument (but certainly not my only argument) for the need for a restart.
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