Posted by
Dawnsblood on Thursday, October 05, 2006 5:49:28 PM
He has a well thought out
analysis of our current problems and a list of fixes that I think would be worth trying but I doubt any politician would have the stones to try. I'll give you a little taste:
The core problem rises out of the adjustments we made to the original
Constitutional order to address the problems of slavery and civil
rights. The 14th Amendment transferred final authority on all such
matters from the states to the federal courts. There was a good reason
for this -- there were serious abuses that many states were simply not
addressing. The creation of a way to appeal to a higher authority gave
people a way to address these serious abuses.The problem this
creates, however, is that it undoes one of the core points of the
Founders' design. The states were meant to be able to come to different
settlements on social questions. From the earliest days of the
Republic, we have been composed of many different kinds of people. The
system achieved stability in part by allowing Puritan descendants in
Boston to live one way, and the folks on Rhode Island (or "Rogue's
Island," as the folks in Boston called it) to do things a different way.If
the Federal government is the arbiter of these social questions, it
must mandate a single path as the "right" one. This exacerbates social
tensions. Consider abortion: currently, pretty much any restriction of
any kind on abortion is banned by the courts' reading of Federal law.
Every place in America has to adhere to this single standard.That
has led to a massive anti-abortion movement, frustrated at every turn,
increasingly angry and active. That movement, in turn, has led to an
increasingly large pro-choice movement, paranoid that the least little
restriction will undermine the whole structure. In the older
form of Federalism, states could pass laws about this -- Vermont could
do one thing, and Alabama another. People were free to move. Tensions
were lower on these contentious issues -- indeed, many of them weren't
contentious.