One genius provision of the Constitution our Founders created this week (Sept. 17) in 1787 was its “Federalist” structure, in which power and responsibility were to be shared not just among the three branches of government, but also between the national government and the state governments. Federalism dictated that all things affecting the entire nation — national defense, foreign policy, regulation of interstate commerce, a uniform currency — are the responsibility of the national government. Everything else, especially those things concerning “the lives and properties of the people and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State” — meaning the health, safety, welfare and morals of its citizens — is the responsibility of the state and local governments.
That means each state must decide the best way to promote “the internal order, improvement and prosperity” of its citizens, and the Founders expected that each state would decide those issues in its own way.
The idea was to make the states “laboratories,” in which they arrived at uniquely different solutions to their civic, cultural, economic, safety and general-welfare challenges. As the Founders saw it, the benefit was two-fold. First, these different solutions to these myriad public-policy challenges would inevitably reflect the prevailing attitudes and mores of the majority of residents in those states, which meant popular support for these solutions. But also, to the extent that the many minorities within each state disliked these majority-based solutions, they were free to “vote with their feet” by moving to another state where its solutions to these challenges were more to their liking.
As a hypothetical example, if your state passed laws prohibiting abortion or mandating religious instruction in schools, and you were a pro-abortion atheist, you could move to one of several states that shared your beliefs.
A second benefit to “Federalism” was that having many (today 50) “laboratories” working on these issues instead of just one — the national government — meant better odds that one state would arrive at a good solution to a problem that other states could adapt to their own unique circumstances. A perfect example is the welfare reform plan Wisconsin developed in the 1990s. Its “workfare” provision, in which welfare recipients had to work to receive benefits, was not only a model for many other states, but also for the national government. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which included a workfare provision, was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democratic president.
Today, alas, this “Federalism,” has been seriously weakened, as the federal government continues to co-opt many of the states’ powers and responsibilities. As a result, diversity has been replaced by a federal government-directed uniformity, limiting both creative experimentation and freedom of choice. The Founders would be dismayed.
