3/5 was written into the Constitution - that couldn’t have been helped.
The rest were mistakes, yes, but they make the case for an even higher majority to pass a law, not a lower one. They’re state issues, not federal issues. If you don’t like the distributed governing system of the US, that’s fine, but the system was designed for local majorities to be able to self-govern on internal affairs and, to that end, I would argue that those were successful pieces of legislation. Sure, their intentions were misguided, but the US system was not designed to deal with bad people and I would argue that no system in the world is well-able to deal with bad people.
The American political system makes quite a lot of sense. It isn't supposed to be top-down. The writers of the law wanted a top-down centralized approach and that isn't how the US Constitution or US States are structured. You can get away with it for a lot of things, but anything this intrusive just doesn't work. Its not the first or, sadly, the last that the federal government will try this sort of thing.
...the federal government, yeah. The mistake was extending it to the states instead of letting their own constitutions say what should happen in their jurisdiction.
> For the better part of US history, there was almost no Constitutional check on state police power
Yeah, that was a mistake which was corrected.
You could just as easily say that democracy doesn't necessitate allowing all people to vote regardless of skin pigmentation, since at one point we had not yet recognized that it in fact does.
It's not easy. But a good starting point would be anything that falls within the bounds of the constitution is clearly a federal issue, essentially be definition. If it's an issue of basic human rights which are protected within the constitution or anything else covered within it, then it has to be a federal issue.
Once we are outside of that, I think the default should be to have it be a state decision unless a strong case can be made for things that affect others crossing state borders or a common good/service that federal taxes pay for (i.e. externalities related to dumping, environmental regulation, borders, immigration, interstate trade, roads/infrastructure, military, etc.)
That should cover the majority of cases and we can argue about the rest as they pop up. As for some of the examples you listed - I get your point but two of those ended up gaining enough support such that there were constitutional amendments put in place to make those even higher than federal law. So maybe if we gave the other two enough time we would have had a self-adjustment through legislation on the state level due to changing opinions or enough support to warrant the supermajority required for a constitutional change.
The other part of this is identifying and viciously pursuing laws that are at odds with each other within the legal system. For example, the bill of rights existed and supposedly protected all persons (citizens or not) within the US. And yet at the same time, those rights were ignored for nearly all of an entire race of people. For that to be consistent at the federal level, one would have had to argue in court that these were not human beings. They didn't do that - they merely declared them as property, but never actually stripped them of their human status, as far as I know.
Reading your comment over again, I realize the first paragraph effectively falls into the same category as the problem I am pointing out, in a way. The implication of "we tried that with slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights/desegregation, gay marriage, and a host of other things" to me reads as "a bunch of people were clearly doing the wrong thing and were given a chance to correct it but they didn't, so they obviously had to be forced to do the right thing." And that's precisely the issue I raised. If someone in Alabama was prevented the right to marry because they were homosexual, but no laws were actually being violated (the supreme court ruling changed that), then should I vote to try to force them into submission if it doesn't affect me or anyone in my state? I'm not sure the answer to that should be yes because it results in the kind of issues we face today. I do realize that "your rights are my responsibility" and all that, but I'm referring to the pre-USSC ruling where it wasn't a federally defined right that required protection.
States rights once again got it wrong. I am not upset at all that the federal government stepped in and fixed it. I am upset that the states themselves allowed this to happen.
I see what you're saying. I don't disagree that there have been actions taken by states under the guise of state's rights that could be considered horrible. However, the true concept of states rights is more than something randomly invented by southerners. This idea is based on the 10th Amendment of the Constitution.
So we should leave those things to the states as was originally intended. The courts should never have tolerated the Federal government being allowed to do things which are not specifically enumerated in the first place.
Which, I believe, is why states rights and autonomy are so important. The federal government wasn’t intended to be a behemoth overseeing half a billion people. It wasn’t to have any authority other than that afforded by the constitution. The balance was intended to be controlled locally at the state level.
When recently reading about the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the individual mandate I saw that 26 or so states were in support. That sounds great: to enforce at the state level. When it’s not a violation of human rights issue, I’d love for states to pursue these goals, then document and communicate them, build communities of ownership around them, and if/when they fail, provide experimental data to other states interested in pursuing that path.
Some states are better at this than others, but I would like to see increasingly liberal policies at the local level and more conservative policies at the federal level (personally).
Were there any states that did real lockdowns or contact tracing? If not, then perhaps the political will did not exist to do so. There certainly is disagreement on such things. If peoples of so many states could not agree on more drastic measures, it would not have been right to impose them from above. Also the constitution limits what the federal government can do in this regard.
I think this is a perfect example of the US completely getting it wrong. If states can't get it right, I think the ability to arbitrarily punish serious crimes should be dissolved to upper government. Why it makes a difference what state you're in is beyond me. I thought it was something they were phasing out of.
Because if it were all handled at a higher level, there is a very good chance these types of policies would be in place for more people. Also, it would take more effort to change them. Concentration of power is not good, didn't you see star wars?
I believe that local control is a very important aspect of a free people, especially in a country as large and diverse as the United States. States right is not a convenient excuse, it is a protection against totaliarism. The Constitution and Bill of Rights protected blacks, and States had to comply, and States right was a specious argument. It was a matter of Constitutional protection.
But I firmly believe that most laws of governance should be state and local so there is choice, reasonable chances for an individual to effect change, and a lower bar to experiment with policy.
No. I mean what I said. The US Government is made up of representatives from the states, but it was not the state governments who wrote the law, it was the federal government.
> The way the country was set up, the laws that affect you are supposed to be made at as local of a level as possible
That's not really true. The various states are (and always have been) unitary states from a political governance perspective. As expressed in modern jurisprudence, the majority of states are Dillon Rule states: states where local governments are purely creatures of the state government, and whose powers (or even existence) can be expanded or abrogated at the sole pleasure of the state.
> and the federal government exists solely to pass laws that affect the entire country, about matters that the states can't handle themselves the way they want, and it's supposed to still be kept as minimal/small as possible.
This is somewhat more true, but it's still a pretty poor reflection. Recall that the US Constitution was not the first form of government the US had: it was a response to the issues with the Articles of Confederation, which had the "federal" government as much, much weaker. It's not even fair to call the US a federal government at that point; the notion of a federal state--two levels of government, each with their own, independent locus of power not derived from the pleasure of the other--was more or less created from scratch for the Constitution.
The Constitution does limit the powers of the federal government to, broadly speaking, two areas, with a third later being developed via amendments. These are international affairs (both in treaty making and military developments) and commercial regulation, with enforcement of civil rights later coming into play. Now, it's the case that things like the EPA or FDA aren't mentioned by the Constitution, but that kind of regulatory authority just didn't exist when it was written, and the existing grants of commercial regulation strongly suggest that it is intended for the federal government to have that regulatory authority to provide a single, integrated market among the several states of the union.
"Also consider that the US is a Republic and lets states keep larger amounts of their rights to run their own state the way they want. There federal government cannot legally prescribe solutions, only encourage and inform."
This is how it should work. But the tenth ammendment has largely been ignored.
Again, this is a canard. Local government in some areas have been shown to make bad decisions that trample on explicit and enumerated rights (rather than the arbitrary or vague "rights" that are conjured to impede reform).
Speaking broadly, and particularly of the late 20th century, when the federal government has stepped in to unilaterally overrule state and local government, it has been on the right side of history. There are, of course, a number of infamous exceptions, but the fact that I would likely be unable to converse with you w/o the federal gov't's historic interventions speaks loudly to their efficacy in suh matters.
The rest were mistakes, yes, but they make the case for an even higher majority to pass a law, not a lower one. They’re state issues, not federal issues. If you don’t like the distributed governing system of the US, that’s fine, but the system was designed for local majorities to be able to self-govern on internal affairs and, to that end, I would argue that those were successful pieces of legislation. Sure, their intentions were misguided, but the US system was not designed to deal with bad people and I would argue that no system in the world is well-able to deal with bad people.
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