.
I don't mean the instances (which are infrequent, but do happen) where courts strike down some elements of legislation because of a separation of powers issue (I believe the Obamacare bill had a couple of those).
I mean the broader public invocation of "state's rights" on domains of policy. I can't think of one that, stripped of rhetoric, doesn't amount to "We want to discriminate against Group X, and the dang federal government won't let us. States' rights!" Is there one that doesn't fall into that category? Anyone?
The people that cry out "States' Rights!" are the first ones to ask for Federal Aid when a tornado or flood devastates their town. Like Governor Christie. It seems they only want "States' Rights!" when it is convenient for them. And Socialism is bad, except when you need help. And gay people are bad, except when it is your son or daughter. And...
If, as the Good Book says (Good Book = The Official Explanations by Paul Dickson), "Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of social intercourse", then it must be...what, the "roofie" of politics?...;-D...
@m2c -- While I happen to agree (based upon what I've read about them) Common Core and NCLB are bad policies, one can oppose them without invoking state's rights.
You do, however, bring up the other main invocation of states rights which is second only to bigotry. It is the circular belief that certain domains should be controlled by state/local government because...well, because they should DAMMIT!
How is the teaching of basic addition to a 6-year-old in Dubuque, IA so different from the teaching of a 6-year-old in Menlo Park, CA or a 6-year-old in East St. Louis, MO? Why does that require local variation?
OK, I will stipulate that our hypothetical students in Dubuque, Menlo Park, and East St. Louis might have some variations in the social situation such that education policies might need to be somewhat different in each case.
But (and this is a crucial but), those who favor local control of education also almost universally favor local concentration of RESOURCES for education. In other words, parents in Palo Alto, CA (one of the richest cities in the SF Bay Area) don't want to share money, facilities, personnel, etc. with East Palo Alto, CA (one of the poorest cities in the SF Bay Area).
Perhaps the motiviation for that is not bigotry, but if it isn't, it's "I've upped mine (i.e. managed to live in a wealthy school district)...now UP YOURS!" That scarcely seems any more morally defensible than overt bigotry.
@m2c -- Sorry, but the Constitution also talks about things like keeping and bearing arms being part of a "well-regulated militia", it talks about the government not investigating people without a warrant, it talks about only Congress being authorized to declare war, and it talks about how Congress needs to publish a record of ALL public expenditures (no exemption for "black" programs).
I have yet to hear a defender of states rights demand that only militias be allowed guns, that the Patriot Act and related domestic spying programs be revoked, that every President since 1950 should have been impeached for getting America into wars without Congressional approval, or complained about the SCOTUS decision in Richardson v. USA.
In short, it sounds suspiciously like you're selectively invoking constitutional language in favor of states rights because you believe the ideologically-driven RESULT of that invocation will be to your liking and ignoring language (e.g. the equal protection clause) that doesn't produce outcomes you favor.
But I thank you, you have done an excellent job of reminding us of the other reasons people who invoke states rights do so. We're up to a list of:
A) Bigotry
B) I've upped mine..now UP YOURS!
C) Because state/local governments are more likely to follow my ideological preferences than the federal government
I'm still not seeing where any of those is really a positive moral stance, but maybe we'll hit upon one eventually.
@m2c -- I did NOT call you a bigot. I noted that there is a consistent history of people trying to defend bigotry on the basis of "states rights." If you are unaware of that historical fact (e.g. segregationists denying the right of the federal government to force desegregation), I cannot help you. Pick up a history book.
Yes, there is language about "states' rights" in the Constitution. There is also language about counting N*gg*rs and Injuns as 3/5ths of a person for census purposes. There is also all sorts of language (as I noted in my previous reply) that states' rights advocates don't give a s**t about when they wax rhetorically about how they are the "true defenders of the Constitution." Constitutional language is ALWAYS subject to interpretation, and interpretation changes over time.
Prior to DC v. Heller, the 2nd Amendment was fairly consistently held to be a collective right related to maintenance of militias (i.e. state National Guard units). That's why laws against private carrying of sawed-off shotguns and strict limits on fully-automatic high-caliber weapons were upheld. Then Justice Scalia reinterpreted the 2nd Amendment to be an individual right, striking down the District of Columbia's handgun law.
Were the states' rights adovcates up in arms saying, "HOW DARE YOU, Justice Scalia! States Rights! D.C. has the right to make whatever gun laws it wants without federal interference?" Of course they were not, becuase they liked the outcome of the decision, regardless of how it interfered with the power of state and local governments to regulate firearms. In fact, they liked the decision BECAUSE it interfered with the power of state and local governments to regulate firearms.
Again, I thank you for this discussion. I see that my question was somewhat ill-posed. The more accurate description of states' rights advocacy is that people will invoke it when they believe state/local governments will enact policies they favor, and ignore it when they prefer whatever the federal policy is. Naturally, because of our country's contentious racial history, a large subset of the above behavior have been people defending bigoted state/local laws (e.g. Jim Crow, or the more recent North Carolina HB2) when those laws contradicted federal policy.
But it's the policy preference that drives the invocation, not any consistent principled idea about the ideal separation of powers between various levels of government.
OS – What you fail to recognise is that all laws are discrimination. That is the function of law. Every time the state protects the rights of one group it strips another group of their rights. The process of law making is simply deciding what trumps what.
The leftist has decided certain groups have a special protected status and the rights of other groups (usually the straight, white, middle class male) will be thrown under the bus whenever they come into conflict.
So yes, the purpose of state’s rights is to discriminate against who the state wishes to discriminate against, instead of who the federal government wishes to discriminate against. Or perhaps just letting the chips fall where they may and declining to interfere in the situation. So what?
Why do you presume the federal government is more enlightened? Even if were more enlightened, so what? Why shouldn’t the democratic will of the local population be respected? After all those who don’t like a particular jurisdiction are free to move to an area that is more in tune with their values. When the federal government decides something there is no escape.
State rights allow the leftist states to be leftist and they allow conservative states to be conservative. Centralization of power inevitably results in endless compromise. Allowing states greater autonomy allows bad ideas to fail and be exposed as a failure and it allows good ideas to succeed and be hailed as a success.
I will wager big that you will get maybe one out of 10 answers that will prove the commenter even knows one thing about this subject. Yet everyone with no clue will chime in.
No one even knows what State's Rights really are or mean on here, yet everyone will chime in with utter nonsense about what they think they know.
I am telling you at the outset, I know very little. I will, however READ what you say to these brilliant minds and learn what it does mean.
All I am seeing about "state's rights" so far is that using the word "modern" regarding bigotry in modern history, seems to be unnecessary. It seems it was invented to support bigotry from the outset.
The appeal to states' rights is of the most potent symbols of the American Civil War, but confusion abounds as to the historical and present meaning of this federalist principle.
The concept of states' rights had been an old idea by 1860. The original thirteen colonies in America in the 1700s, separated from the mother country in Europe by a vast ocean, were use to making many of their own decisions and ignoring quite a few of the rules imposed on them from abroad. During the American Revolution, the founding fathers were forced to compromise with the states to ensure ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of a united country. In fact, the original Constitution banned slavery, but Virginia would not accept it; and Massachusetts would not ratify the document without a Bill of Rights.
The debate over which powers rightly belonged to the states and which to the Federal Government became heated again in the 1820s and 1830s fueled by the divisive issue of whether slavery would be allowed in the new territories forming as the nation expanded westward.
Do you know why they made the 3/5 rule?
It is not racist as most think. It was a way to prevent the south (slave owning states) from being over represented....by counting the slaves. Now we all know the elected representives were NOT in any way representing the slaves. They were only representing the owners.
So what? The only thing a state should have to do to receive federal support is pay federal taxes.
Why should that require obedience on all kinds of completely unrelated issues?
You treat the federal government as if it's a deity that is owed reverence instead of a servant that should just be paid for the services required.
Old, this will go on and on. This person cannot stop. Will not stop and will wear you down to the point where you just do not care to continue.
And watch yourself when you are accused by this person of being called a racist. She is our NEW MOD.
You will learn, as I have, it is best not to even start any answer at all.
@GoldfingerWannabe -- Meanwhile, back in the Real World...
It is often very amusing watching you trying to map your philosophical system on to reality. The amount of denial, hand-waving, and being just plain f***ing WRONG in the service to STOOPID EBIL LIBRUHL-bashing is crowning achievement in motivated cognition.
But when you start with completely flawed premises, these things can be expected to happen.
Re: What you fail to recognise is that all laws are discrimination. I don't recognize it because it's bulls**t. Well, OK, yes. The law "discriminates" against murderers committing murder, theives committing robbery, and so forth. But the law (at least in modern principle) doesn't discriminate in saying "We're only going to outlaw murders by White people, or Black People, or men named Horace, or people who don't attend 1st Baptist Church.
And when the government uses public funds to build a park, ALL people get to use it, not just whites, or blacks, or guys named Horace, or etc.
Does it always shake out that way in real life? Of course not, governing institutions regardless of size are imperfect. But that's how the law is supposed to work.
Re: Why do you presume the federal government is more enlightened? I don't necessarily. But since the Supreme Court overturned Plessey v. Furgeson and started taking the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment seriously, it has been MUCH BETTER than many states at getting closer to the ideal of "All persons are created equal". Scoreboard, baby!
Re: Allowing states greater autonomy allows bad ideas to fail and be exposed as a failure and it allows good ideas to succeed and be hailed as a success. Um, in real life, no, it doesn't. Otherwise Jim Crow would not have endured for all the decades that it did.
Instead, what typically happens is the most provincial narrow-minded people at the state and local level gain control of their governments and implement various forms of despotism. See, for example, the brouhaha over North Carolina's HB2 (which "legalizes" many forms of discrimination against the LGBT community in contravention to federal law).
Now, maybe your ignorance of United States history is on par with that of most Americans, in which case you might be forgiven for not realizing that your theorizing has very little basis in reality. But I suspect it's more a case that you're desperately trying to defend the indefensible in order to keep up your "IT'S TEH STOOPID EBIL LIBRUHLZ FAULT!" worldview. I'm sorry you value your hatred more than you desire to undestand the world as it really is.
@m2c -- So what?
The point is the language is in the Constitution, it's still in the Constitution, and today the language is completely ignored (as it is in several other instancs I cited).
So when you cite language in the Constitution which you claim supports your version of "states rights," that doesn't say anything. If the prevailing interpretation of the language doesn't support your view (just as the prevailing interpretation doesn't support my view that the 2nd Amendment is about militias), then you've got nothing except a political preference the words be interpreted differently.
The prevailing interpretation of state's rights does not let a state or local government make N*gg*rs and Sp*cs drink from separate drinking fountains than White people. I think that's a good thing.
If you can come up with a principled defense of "state's rights" which still excludes the above possibilty (other than hand-waving with "Well, not state would EVER do that nowadays..."), go for it.
Of course, that would require you to address the actual question, instead of focusing on your feigned butthurt about bigotry/racism. But give it try.
@DJAM -- Thank you for the advice. I think your analysis of the situation is most likely correct.
I will continue to respond so long as I think my responses will be of some use to anyone reading this thread. Once that ceases to be true, I will stop.
This isn't my first rodeo....;-D....
@GoldfingerWannabe --
Re: You treat the federal government as if it's a deity that is owed reverence instead of a servant that should just be paid for the services required.
Your use of this prejudical Straw Man indicates you have no real interest in constructive discussion of the issue and are instead, as is typical for you, STOOPID EBIL LIBRUHL-bashing.
Well, your mother wears Army boots. So there...;-D...
Upon further reflection, without My2 and the Usuals, I might have missed reams of sound information not offerered BY them.
I seldom answer questions to certain people to answer them, but rather hope that someone who the answer makes sense, or wants to hear some information they may be interested in, will actually read.
#not first rodeo either; however, should have trusted you to know what is up though
No, prior to DC vs Heller the 2nd amendment was not considered collective....it has always been considered an individual right. That is just he new way for gun control activists have been trying to get around the 2nd.
The first court case involving the 2nd was very clear. In 1846, Nunn vs GA:
The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State.
LOL
@m2c -- And you continue to evade by diving into minutiae
Moreover...Re: "shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree;"
And yet we do not allow felons, or children, or the mentally incompetent to own guns. In a few states, "assault weapons" are legally banned. People, regardless of competentcy are not allowed to own bazookas, main battle tanks, or M-61 nuclear warheads.
You keep missing the point, because you WANT the Constitution to say what you WANT it to say, not because that's how it's actually enacted.
If "following the Constitution" is so important to you, why aren't you out there on the protest lines demanding your right to own a bazooka? Right, because you don't care about the "constitutionality" of what you don't care about. IDEOLOGY drives your concern about the "constitiution" and "states rights", not a consistent rational philosophical standard about the appropriate division of power between federal, state, and local governments.
But, feel free to keep throwing up Red Herrings. I can keep knocking them down all day long....;-D...
People love to pick and choose, on both sides.
@Mr. B (For President!) -- I partly agree.
There does, however, tend to be a crucial asymmetry.
Let's aay a state passes a law which discriminates. Many defenders of the law won't say discrimination is a desirable goal, but they will defend the law claiming it's a state's prerogative to pass such laws.
Conversely, on a issue like legalized weed or expanded euthanasia rights, the proponents will argue BOTH for the moral good of the issue AND that the federal government should not interfere. Of course, there is some "both sides of that as well (e.g. anti-abortion advocactes would like to see a federal ban, but I think history suggests "state's rights" is invoked more often when there is a relatively broad societal consensus contrary to what the invoker would like to see.
You haven't thought it through. All laws discriminate.
When the government uses public funds to build a park and makes it open to all, that discriminates against those who desire a segregated society. It undermines their right to free association. (Since we are unsympathetic to their feelings we decide to throw them under the bus. I fully support that decision. F*** 'em. It's still discrimination though. Just good discrimination.)
"Re: Allowing states greater autonomy allows bad ideas to fail and be exposed as a failure and it allows good ideas to succeed and be hailed as a success. Um, in real life, no, it doesn't. Otherwise Jim Crow would not have endured for all the decades that it did."
A short sighted view. History plays out over centuries. Policies do take decades to fail. Jim Crow laws did fail.
http://www.alternet.org/media/most-depressing-discovery-about-brain...
This link is typical of you Old School. Did it ever occur to you that you might be vulnerable to the same effects? Or is your brain somehow special?
We have been evolving for millions of years. Did it occur to you that our brains wouldn't operate that way unless there were some benefit to it? Did you it occur to you that if being Mr Spock truly was optimal for human decision making, humans would have evolved to be completely robotic rationalists?
Did it occur to you that someone who would immediately change their mind about something when presented with contradictory evidence would be the most gullible idiot ever? Cognitive dissonance is a counter measure to deception. Evolution has decided that being somewhat pigheaded is preferable to following like a sheep.
The real world is not math. In the real world the data is very incomplete and most of it has been fabricated by various interests. Like all rationalists you fail to see that virtually everything in life is based on faith, not reason.
