Katrina vanden Heuvel: States' Rights in Our Participatory Democracy

[marmar]

from The Nation:



States' Rights in Our Participatory Democracy
posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 04/05/2010 @ 1:18pm


Recently, conservative Americans have re-elevated "States' rights" to holy-grail status in politics, often as justification for badmouthing President Obama and the Democratic 111th Congress. Yet states' rights is a constitutional, not political, issue, and the idea of a balance of power between the federal and state governments is neither conservative nor liberal at heart. It pertains to the theoretical process and function of government, not to the substantive, individual acts of governance themselves.

Take the insidious Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which allowed the federal government to override local autonomy, even in the North, to help Southerners capture escaped slaves. Northerners decried the law as a breach of states' rights; it effectively extended slavery into supposedly free states. But Southerners, who relied on a states' rights argument to preserve slavery, took the opposite tack in this case and embraced the federal government--Washington's power was needed to enforce the law and maintain the Peculiar Institution. As historian (and Nation editorial board member) Eric Foner points out, "...It's a very odd thing that a region, the South, which supposedly believed in states' rights and local autonomy, pressed for this law which allowed the federal government to completely override the legal processes in the North: to send marshals in, to avoid the local courts, and to just seize people (they might be free born) and just drag them into the South as slaves. It shows that the South didn't believe in states' rights. It believed in slavery. States' rights was a defense of slavery. But when active federal power was needed to defend slavery, they were perfectly happy to utilize that also." Where states' rights is concerned, then, real-world politics can always be counted on to trump theoretical political science.

To wit, President Andrew Jackson saw states' rights not as a pie thrown in Washington's face, but rather as a contract between federal and state governments. At his second inaugural in 1833, Jackson declared, "...My countrymen will ever find me ready to exercise my constitutional powers in arresting measures which may directly or indirectly encroach upon the rights of the States or tend to consolidate all political power in the General Government. But of equal, and, indeed, of incalculable, importance is the union of these States, and the sacred duty of all to contribute to its preservation by a liberal support of the General Government in the exercise of its just powers." .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/548688/states_rights_in_our_participatory_democracy

[Skink]

1. does she post on DU?

:loveya: