Making America Work

Making It Work:

The Economist has a strong piece on the subject of success in American politics. Why, they begin, are things looking so hard for Washington, D.C.? Blame Obama:

Although a Democratic president is in the White House and Democrats control both House and Senate, Mr Obama has been unable to enact health-care reform, a Democratic goal for many decades. His cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon emissions has passed the House but languishes in the Senate. Now a bill to boost job-creation is stuck there as well. Nor is it just a question of a governing party failing to get its way. Washington seems incapable of fixing America’s deeper problems. Democrats and Republicans may disagree about climate change and health, but nobody thinks that America can ignore the federal deficit, already 10% of GDP and with a generation of baby-boomers just about to retire. Yet an attempt to set up a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission has recently collapsed—again....

America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling” chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad support.

So, it turns out that obeying the 10th Amendment's restriction on Federal powers is not just the right thing to do for constitutional reasons. It is also the more effective way to enact the policy you prefer. If you're willing to set your goal as "Changing the way we do things in California," or "Making Massachusetts better," you can accomplish a lot -- and with low constitutional hurdles to clear.

If what you want to do is "Change America," that's going to be harder. It's supposed to be hard. America has always been big -- even the 13 original states, in an era before railroads and other motorized travel covered a substantial area. It has always been diverse, with agricultural areas and urban ones; with different religious groups and interests, and immigrants from everywhere.

The model is designed to let different parts of this big, diverse nation do different things. You're supposed to be able to live the way you want in Tennessee, if you can't in Boston. That's the idea.

If it's hard to wrench the ship of state to a new course on a whim, it's supposed to be. The Federal government has wide powers to alter those few things that are really supposed to be its job. The Bush administration, which wanted little authority over the day to day lives of Americans, wielded tremendous and decisive authority in international affairs: and of course they could do so, because that was a legitimate area for the Federal government to exercise wide authority. Therefore, the Founders designed the system to support that kind of action.

If it's hard to force legislation on the country at the Federal level, good. Maybe you should stop and do something else instead. The only new Federal laws we really need are laws to repeal some of the existing over-regulation of our daily lives; and to reduce the percentage of our paycheck-to-paycheck wealth that the Federal government intends to suck up and spend.

Aside from that, we've got all the Federal laws we need.