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Let the States Decide
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12334 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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1 / 1987 |
2,579 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Fein
Bruce Fein is a constitutional and international lawyer as
well as a journalist. |
Since the Great Depression and the inauguration of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the vast majority of public policymakers and voters have held an unreflective conviction that problems are best addressed by Congress and the president on a nationwide basis rather than by individual states embracing variegated approaches.
The idea of federalism - that is, a preference for independent state policy-making and sovereignty in lieu of nationwide rules ordained by Congress, the president, or federal regulatory agencies - virtually disappeared from political debate during the heyday of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program. In the 1960s, the federal government became the dominant policy force in a broad spectrum of fields traditionally subject to state control: manpower training, welfare, medical care for the impoverished or aged, education, housing assistance, local development of blighted areas, and voting laws. The federal government, Johnson and his colleagues tacitly assumed, was uniquely endowed with the wisdom and financial resources to eliminate poverty or other untoward conditions in society.
However, evidence accumulated in the aftermath of the Johnson presidency casting grave doubt on that assumption. Federal manpower training programs proved exorbitantly costly, and only a few obtained permanent employment. The fundamental causes of poverty seemed untouched by federal welfare assistance, while the number of illegitimate births, teenage pregnancies, and female-headed households among the poor mushroomed. The costs of medical care for the aged, the indigent, and others, skyrocketed, far outpacing the rate of inflation. Federal education expenditures produced no gains and some apparent loss in student achievement. Federal public housing projects for the poor, symbolized by the dramatic dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis, seemed to create more problems than they ameliorated. The federal Model Cities Program to assist local development failed in its mission.
This substantial evidence of malfunctioning laws should have suggested the possibility that perhaps the federal government, despite its good intentions, lacked institutional attributes necessary to fashion enlightened public policy. That possibility, however, has never entered serious public debate in the 18 years since Johnson left office. Members of Congress and presidents, irrespective of political party affiliation, discovered political rewards in an ever-expanding public policy jurisdiction that blinded them to evidence of federal
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