State Rights

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina many people are questioning the ‘sluggish’ response of the federal aid. As I believe I’ve mentioned once already, this was partially the result of the Louisiana Governor declining the initial offer of federal assistance shortly after the hurricane struck. There were other factors, communication issues, coordination problems between state and local officials that compounded when federal assistance did get the okay to provide aid. While some of these probably were problems with the federal response, many were fundamental problems at the state and local levels.

All of this has led to people questioning why Bush didn’t force the issue and step in, and the reports are that he considered it. With the issuing of an Executive Order, he could technically have moved in and secured Louisiana with federal troops, why didn’t he? State Rights. State Rights have been dying a slow and painful death for decades at the least, but had “W” taken that step it would have essentially put the final nail in the coffin and placed us all directly under the bloated power of the federal government.

He would have set the precedent that the President could, at any time, use Federal Military Forces to seize control of any State in the Union. There is a reason that this is not meant to happen … and it is in essence the same reason that the President couldn’t send troops over to secure Spain after the train bombs last year … he would be grossly overstepping his jurisdiction. This is the type of thing that ignited the war between the states in the first place … the right of the state to govern itself.

People have forgotten the idea that this country was originally organized around … local control by the people. The idea was that most of the ‘government’ that affected our lives was to come from the most local level so that ‘we the people’ could control it. City governments were responsible for handling disputes and enforcing the law of the local area … state governments were to manage those disputes that arose between towns … the role of the federal government was to look to the protection of the states and manage disputes between the states to allow fair and equal treatment based on the constitution. The states were, in essence, small countries with the federal government mediating between them and maintaining the forces necessary to protect the whole.

Now we have President Bush saying Congress should consider whether the federal government should have more authority to step into disaster areas without a request from the states. The answer should be ‘no’ … we don’t need to give the federal government any more authority than it already has, and I would say that we actually need to take some of the authority that it has now, and return it to the States where it more appropriately matches the original ideas on which this country was established.

We as a country need to stop looking to the federal government to ‘bail’ us out … it is not their job. Why does a state need to build a state highway that has to be financed 75-100% by the federal government and has to be maintained primarily through federal funds? The idea is supposed to be that those funds should come from the local level … where the people providing the money can keep a closer idea on where their money is going. What money can’t be gained by the state should come from private investment not money taken by the federal government from people on the other side of the continent. But politicians learned a long time ago that things are so much easier to handle when they are out of sight of the people funding them … it is much easier to get funding for ‘pork’ projects when the money is collected by the federal government and then distributed to the states …

The system also makes it easier to hide ‘pork’ problems at the local level … ‘local’ tax money can be collected and spent reasonably on ‘proper’ projects while federal money can be used for the ‘pork’ projects because the locals won’t look at those numbers as closely … after all … that’s not THEIR money … that’s federal money.

No … the federal government doesn’t need more authority to step in without request from the state … the states need more authority to handle disaster situations. Of course that would mean that the blame for the failures to plan, to use the money and resources properly, for maintaining law and order, and all of the other duties of the state would fall on the state and local government….