The Katrina catastrophe has started a lot of people thinking about federalism....
Betsy's Page
.... and the roles of the central and state governments. This has been echoing for me as my history classes have reached the unit on the writing of the Constitution and the fears of the Anti-Federalists of power seeping away from the states and coming to rest in a Leviathan federal government.
Well, the Anti-Federalists lost their struggle against the Constitution. And the Jeffersonians lost their struggle against Alexander Hamilton increaing the power of the federal government through economic means. And, I believe, we're losing even more authority for the state governments if we start absolving them of all responsibility for preparations to keep their citizens safe. Julie Young, writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has some more to say about how we are continuing on the road to losing the delicate balance between federal and state powers.
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Over and over in the news and rehashing, we hear people decrying that the federal government simply didn't do enough to prevent this, didn't do enough to remedy that and simply doesn't care enough about the victims' predicament.
What seems to be absent from the reports is the lack of prevention, preparation and protection that is incumbent upon local governments to provide.
The federal government's role is to be a means to spread the risk in times of disaster but the first and foremost line of defense against tragedy falls to state and local governments. Our Founding Fathers started from the proposition that the states were sovereign. It makes sense that the local governments are in the best position to determine, assess and mitigate the peculiar vulnerabilities of the locale and plan for and around these.
Throughout history we have reaffirmed our commitment to this principle -- e.g., the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878. Our federal government is ill-suited at best to minister to the needs of a town, let alone a community, family or individual. How is it rational to expect the federal government to be better at identifying the needy, the elderly, infirm or simply intractable in a community?
It seems that many voices critical of the federal government's response have mentally written off one of the fundamental strengths of U.S. governance -- the idea that primary responsibility for people's well-being falls first to the individual, and from there flows through the family and community to local and state governments. It is only after passing through these channels that the federal government is, or should be, implicated.
When we invoke the federal government as the initial responder, we effectively adopt a European model. We must resist this path, as it is inherently less effective. For a contrasting example, remember the European heat wave in August 2003 -- 15,000 deaths in France alone!
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Sometimes I feel that there is the textbook lesson on the Constitution that I should teach and then there is the reality-based lesson on how things really work. And having a federal government of carefully enumerated powers with the rest of the powers resting at the levels of government closest to the people is just something we see in the textbooks. And both parties are responsible. They both lard up the budget bills with pork projects that, in no way, should be a federal responsibility such as building roads totally within one state or funding local museums or bike paths. And Tom DeLay lays bare the premise that Republicans are against wasteful government spending when he proclaims that there is no money in the budget to cut. Debra Saunders writes today about how efforts to keep pork out of the emergency aid for the Gulf Coast is going nowhere.
I don't object to the emergency aid to states afflicted by natural disasters. That is fine that the federal government should be there to help out in such situations when the states simply can't bear the cost of helping cities like New Orleans or Biloxi to rebuild. But, just think of how much money we would have available to fund that rebuilding effort if we cut out all the pork put into bills that has nothing to do with federal responsibilities. Sure, a bike path is nice. But it isn't something that the federal government needs to fund. Those poor Anti-Federalists seem to lose their battles over and over again each generation of American history.
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