Federal Table Scraps: the Disappearing State Identity

I recently ran across an AP story, singular to me in how it captured the sorry state of today’s “federal” system of government. Please, take a look at it. It’s really a gem. Savor, for a moment, the casual manner in which it describes local governments begging at the door of the federal government for the means to provide necessary services to citizens:

The conference’s president, Mayor Doug Palmer of Trenton, N.J., called the new dollars “a start” but said “certainly more is necessary.”
“We’ve asked for more cops,” Palmer said after Mukasey’s speech. “That didn’t happen. So we’re looking to increase the cops funding to put more police on the street.”
He added: “We’re looking for any kinds of money that you can use.”

The obsequious way in which Mukasey’s concerns (valid, though immaterial) are parroted by the mendicant mayors to smooth the hustle really sticks in the craw. The most remarkable aspect of the story is that the author and everyone cited in the article fail to question the basic premise of the executive action being taken: that the federal government is somehow responsible for providing funding for local law enforcement.

The event described by this article defies the direst predictions of even the most strident anti-federalist critics of the new Constitution in the run-up to ratification in 1789. Indeed, it embodies the criticism leveled by Samuel Bryan in his famous reply to James Wilson’s defense of ratification. Speaking of the authority of Congress to levy excise taxes as well as imposts, Mr. Bryan said,

But to extend this to excises, and every species of internal taxation would necessarily require so many ordinances of Congress, affecting the body of the people, as would perpetually interfere with the State laws and personal concerns of the people. This alone would directly tend to annihilate the particular governments; for the people fatigued with the operations of two masters would be apt to rid themselves of the weaker.

What Bryan is saying here is that a federal government armed with sovereignty and free to tax and spend in a limitless fashion will do so, and thereby will gradually eclipse the role of lesser, provincial (read: “state”) governments. None of the Founding Fathers could have imagined a scope of central government where the amount of taxes levied by the federal government would eclipse and even triple those levied by the states, and where most of the public services rendered by the states are funded in large part through federal dollars. Imagine their horror at witnessing their precious, sovereign states squabbling over their share of federal table scraps and using them as bargaining chips for votes in Congress.

The principle of divided authority is crucial to the proper functioning of a federal system of government. The central (often called the “federal”) government is to provide only those services and assume authority in only those circumstances that encompass the welfare of the nation as a whole and cannot be administered at the local level without creating confusion and disunion. Ideally, one would not be able to trace any “federal dollars” spent in benefit of the citizens of one state or another. Any dollar spent in a fashion that could be argued to benefit one state directly should never have been spent to begin with. It is the responsibility of the states themselves to provide such services. Their different manners and extents of doing so are how they compete in the free market of citizenship. States with successful, sound governments will attract businesses and citizens.

More specifically, they will also attract like minded citizens. Americans don’t all have to agree on every aspect of how government should function (and never will). That’s what the different states are for. There are basic values that define America and form a basis for our union, but those values need not, and probably should not, extend to homogeneity. We probably need a consensus on when we go to war and what constitutes a marriage, but we don’t have to agree on how much funding schools get or even whether healthcare should be socialized.

For instance, if California wants socialized healthcare, they can try it. I may find it absurd and directly contrary to the foundational principles on which this nation was based, but I feel strongly that a state’s prerogative to chart its own course is even more integral to the founding principles. The citizens of any given state can vote in the booth and then with their feet… and so can businesses. Call it governmental capitalism: states competing for constituents and businesses. Sounds rather… efficient, doesn’t it?

So far is our current situation from the original vision of limited federal government that it almost defies explication. I could expound for hours on it, but it would just depress me. Allow Alexis de Tocqueville to sum it up for me:

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

So how did we get here? Well, lately I’ve been thinking about representation.

In his Farewell Address to the Nation, George Washington warned against the careless amending of the Constitution they had so carefully crafted in convention:

Towards the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown.

While it can scarce be disputed that many such “innovations” which have since been embraced and adopted have resulted in unalloyed blessings to the people of the United States (Amendments 13-15 come to mind… and were demonstrably presaged by the founders themselves), I have often reflected on where we might perhaps have overstepped the line in our alterations. Might we in our innovation have stumbled into divergence… or even aberration?

It is a fact acknowledged with some disdain in modern social sciences that the U.S. Constitution, as originally written and ratified, insulated the Executive, Judicial, and half the Legislative branch from raw popular vote. This has since, for better or for worse (and I think it’s a little of both), been amended to encompass the direct popular election of Senators and pledged Presidential delegates. The reasons for these amendments, made in the best spirit of democracy, are no doubt sound and noble. This, however, does not mean that the reasons for the original arrangements were any less sound and noble.

Despite a healthy disdain for the civic awareness and sound learning of the masses, the author of For a Course of Years is, at heart, a man of the people. Don’t let my native pessimism fool you: for all my bluster, I have an embarrassingly ingenuous faith in the collective wisdom of the common man—insofar as society as a whole chooses to be moral and upright. Ignorance in any guise is reprehensible, but benevolent ignorance in the collective is redeemingly wise and the aggregate of its polity is justice. It is manifestly evident that this was the hope on which founding fathers pinned the whole operation of the federal system when drafting the Constitution. Some few quotations, culled from hundreds, will suffice to make this point:

“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government.” —George Washington, Farewell Address to the Nation, 1976

“Our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” —John Adams, Letter to Mass. Military Officers, 1798

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” —Benjamin Franklin

Enough said on this point.

Despite the feelings expressed by our Founding Fathers indicating that they shared my faith in the collective wisdom of a moral public, they chose not to invest the people with direct representation at most levels of the Federal government. The House of Representatives responds directly to the public mandate, but in the case of the Senate, the Presidency, and (by extension) those offices appointed by the President with advice and consent of the Senate, that public mandate was filtered to one extent or another. In the case of the Senators, they were to be appointed by the state legislatures. The President and Vice President were to be elected by delegates to the Electoral College who were in turn appointed by the state legislatures.

Over the course of time, by amendment and practice, these filters were gradually removed. Amendment 17 stripped state legislatures of the power to appoint senators and their mandate was transferred to the same ballot box that chose representatives. The same spirit of faith in unbridled popular mandate had by then already led the sundry states to abdicate or surrender their prerogative for choosing presidential electors to the ballot box as well, though this change has never been codified at the federal (let alone Constitutional) level.¹

It may well be impossible to know what ill consequences might have betid our nation had a continuance in a more “insulated” form of representation been its course, and it is this fact which makes the point I venture to assert here a precarious one, but I’m going to say it anyway:

Popular mandate filtered through state government seems to be a more sure way of averting the creeping gradualism of federal expansion, and actually leads to an overall system of government that is more responsive to the will of the people.

There. I said it. And having said it, I already feel better about it. For having uttered something so anti-populist, in writing no less, I will have demolished any chance of ever winning an election… which is to say that I have uttered something so profoundly true that it would inspire loathing in at least half the constituency.

Before you carry me off and lynch me for heresy, understand that this admission has been a hard one for me. I’m a man of the people too, and I live in a state whose legislature I would not entrust with anything more precious to me than my laundry. The notion that handing more power to a state legislature that I already loathe with all my being could improve the health of our federal system is a bitter pill to swallow… TRUST ME. But I still think it’s true.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s break this down and see how I arrived at this conclusion. I know it seems counterintuitive, but you can’t expect to arrive at the same conclusion as venerated geniuses without some mental gymnastics.

The state legislatures themselves being appointed by direct election, what purpose could be served by filtering the public mandate through them in elections for federal office? The answer is simple, if you think about it: checks and balances. We’ve all learned about the checks and balances between the branches of the federal government; each branch is beholden to the others in some respect and simultaneously exercises a check on their power. Might it not stand to reason that the Founders fashioned the system of electing senators and presidents with the same notion in mind?

The Constitution clearly grants overriding sovereignty to the central government and it thereby stands as the ultimate check on the power of the state governments. In short, the Federal government can take almost any power or responsibility it chooses from the states. By controlling the appointment of senators and presidential electors, the States would have a crucial check on the otherwise all-encompassing power of the central government. State legislatures, you see, are unlikely to appoint federal representation that has demonstrated an inclination toward encroaching on states’ rights.

So far I have demonstrated only that a federal system so arranged would be more respectful of the juridiction and responsibilities of state governments, yet my statement above asserts that this system leads to a system of government which is “more responsive to the people“. How so? Any time you want to understand Constitutional underpinnings and the reasoning behind them, it’s not a bad idea to consult Library of America’s Debate on the Constitution two-volume set. Both the proponents and detractors of the Constitution have interesting and insightful things to say which shed light on what could be termed “original intent”. In a show of distrust for the level of sovereignty invested in the central government through the new Constitution, James Winthrop opined:

To promote the happiness of the people it is necessary that there should be local laws; and it is necessary that those laws should be made by the representatives of those who are immediately subject to the want of them. [...] It is impossible for one code of laws to suit both Georgia and Massachusetts. They must, therefore, legislate for themselves. —James Winthrop, “Agrippa IV”, Massachusetts Gazette, Dec. 4 1787

No matter how beholden the Senate and President are to the masses at large for their direct election, they will never be as responsive to the needs of the citizens of the various states as their own local governments. The state, county, and city governments should always be primarily responsible for the well being and happiness of their citizens. How can a national body or agency hope to address the crime fighting needs of Trenton, NJ better than its own mayor and city council?

Yet, there they are: America’s mendicant mayors begging for federal table scraps because the federal government has already taxed the public to the breaking point and controls the lion’s share of the funds. Money is power, you see, and the people holding the purse strings in Washington are no longer in any way beholden to the state governments for anything. Thanks to the 16th Amendment (another of those “innovations”), there is no limit on what purses the federal government can raid, so they grow and encroach as they tax and spend… bribing the public with the public’s own money.

Fabius Cincinnatus

 

 

1—It is a fundamental misunderstanding of this (and many another) point of Constitutional Law that has lead to continuing objections from the more soft-brained liberal quarters regarding the Florida elections debacle of 2000. Ultimately, the appointment of electors is the prerogative of the state legislature to carry out in any way they please and/or tacitly approve of. Even if the results of the recounts, official or independent, had gone another way, the State of Florida would still have been free to “appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…”