Commentary
There is a moment, rare in American political life, when the noise of faction falls away and something structural becomes visible underneath it. That moment appears to have arrived, at least tentatively, in Oklahoma City and wherever else these bipartisan gatherings of governors and state lawmakers have lately convened. Leaders of both parties are saying, on the record and in organized assembly, that the federal government holds too much power and that more authority must be returned to the states. The skeptic in me reaches immediately for his salt shaker. The constitutionalist in me leans forward in his chair.
Skepticism is warranted not because the complaint is wrong but because it is old and because it has so often been made in bad faith. Every party that loses the White House discovers the Tenth Amendment. Every party that wins it loses interest in the document. The republic has watched this cycle grind for generations, and the cynicism it has produced is not irrational. When a Republican governor who was content with expansive federal authority under a Republican president suddenly finds the constitutional case for state sovereignty, the performance is not entirely convincing. The mirror situation for Democratic governors is equally familiar. And yet, and this deserves to be said plainly, a bipartisan gathering focused on state authority is not the same thing as a partisan press release. When the complaint crosses party lines in organized institutional form, it at least deserves a hearing it does not ordinarily receive.
The constitutional case for state authority does not need a news hook to be true. The American republic was designed, with great deliberateness, as a compound system in which sovereign states delegated specific and limited powers to a central government and retained the remainder. That design has been eroded over two centuries by war, commerce-clause adventurism, conditional federal spending used as a leash on state policy, and a general Washington assumption that any problem of national scope is therefore a problem requiring a national solution imposed uniformly on 330 million people living under vastly different conditions. A wheat farmer in the Oklahoma panhandle and a software engineer in Austin, Texas do not require identical governance, and pretending otherwise is an exercise in bureaucratic fantasy that does measurable damage to both.
What gives this moment its particular interest is the inclusion of the president himself in the complaint. State leaders are not merely objecting to a hostile administration; they are, by the source of this reporting, identifying the executive power broadly as having outgrown its constitutional bounds. That is a more serious allegation than ordinary partisan grievance. It suggests that even when their own preferred party holds the White House, these governors and legislators have noticed that the machinery of federal dominance does not pause. The permanent administrative capacity of Washington does not shrink between administrations. The grant money, with its strings, flows regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. The regulatory web expands in administrations of both parties, perhaps at different speeds, certainly in different preferred directions, but always outward, always at the expense of the county courthouse and the state legislature.
What would returning authority to the states actually require? It is a harder question than the gatherings probably confronted. It would require state legislatures to appropriate their own money for purposes they currently fund through federal grants, which means telling their own taxpayers what things cost rather than disguising the bill in the federal budget. It would require governors to accept that a neighboring state might choose policies they find repugnant, and to refrain from running to Washington to harmonize the differences away. It would require Congress to stop legislating on subjects the Constitution did not assign to it, which requires members of Congress to give up power they have spent careers accumulating. None of that is cheap or comfortable. States’ rights as a slogan costs nothing. States’ rights as a structural reality requires sacrifice that politicians are historically reluctant to make when the cameras leave.
Still, organized gatherings of this kind do occasionally produce durable institutional change. The history of American federalism contains periods of genuine devolution as well as the more familiar story of centralization. State compacts, legislative refusals to implement federal programs, constitutional litigation, and simple administrative non-cooperation have all served as instruments of state resistance, and all have sometimes worked. The spirit behind those instruments does not require a particular political valence. The desire of a community to govern itself according to its own habits and values is not a right-wing idea or a left-wing idea; it is the foundational American idea, present in the very act of refusing to be administered from a distant capital.
What is lost when a place stops governing itself is harder to name than a statute and harder to recover than a lost election. It is the civic habit, the assumption that the people of a county or a township have something to say about the conditions of their own lives, that their meetings and their votes and their local knowledge matter to the outcome. When that assumption is replaced by the working assumption that policy arrives from Washington and local governments merely administer it, something in the character of a people changes quietly, and the change is not reversed simply by passing a resolution at a bipartisan conference. The governors may be right about the problem. The question the republic needs answered is whether they have the institutional will to do the unglamorous work of actually taking their power back, rather than merely complaining, at a well-attended gathering, that it was taken.