Unity through Federalism

Source: National Review | November 22, 2016 | Chip Roy

A return to the decentralized government envisioned by America’s Founding Fathers would alleviate our political malaise.

Why is there so much despair in our collective response to politics today?

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This is the way American politics works in 2016. If your party controls the White House, you claim a mandate; if it doesn’t, you declare that dark days and the end of the republic are upon us.

How did it come to this?

Simply put, the American people increasingly recognize that they are losing their right of self-government to an “intellectual elite in a far-distant capital [that claims it] can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves,” as Ronald Reagan put it in 1964. The problem has only gotten worse since then. The federal bureaucracy and its laws, rules, regulations, and policies now touch nearly all aspects of business and life.

Some say we need more uniformity across the United States. But in fact, it is actually forced uniformity through federal action that is tearing us apart.

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To be clear, we certainly want to engage as citizens. But, it’s frankly un-American that we are so wrapped up in the cult of the presidency, the bureaucrats, and the courts. The Constitution was meant to protect our God-given rights as Americans to live — to direct the education of our children, choose our doctors, and focus on our local needs for water, police, roads and electricity — free from government intrusion.

This is the essence of federalism, that magical alignment of power in our founding that bound us together as one, but very purposefully limited the central government’s authority in an effort to protect the states and the people.

In 1821, five years before he died, Thomas Jefferson observed in his autobiography that we should want states even if we hadn’t inherited them. “t is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected,” he wrote. “Were not this great country already divided into states, that division must be made, that each might do for itself what concerns itself directly, and what it can so much better do than a distant authority.”

Left and Right, red state and blue, we should join together today as states in a shared commitment to making Washington, D.C. less important in our lives, and to working with the new administration to embrace the structural blessing of a federalist system in which we live free from a “distant authority.” Through federalism, we can and will find peace, strength, and unity as a nation.

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