GOP Should Return To Federalism And Inspire True Change

Joe Bell

Having been handed a significant defeat at the polls last month the Republican Party must engage in serious introspection and determine how it can be relevant to the American people. Change was demanded throughout the election season. The GOP can promote real change for the better by advocating an idea it once embraced - federalism.

Federalism divides power between a central government and smaller, regional units of government. According to the Constitution, the states are more than provincial representatives of an overarching national command. They have certain powers and they have their own legislative, executive and judicial branches. States can pass and enforce laws, enabling them to address issues pertinent to their constituencies. The federal government has its own areas of authority, including national defense and the power to make treaties.

Former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese observed that at the Constitutional Convention there was concern that an overreaction to the defects of the Articles of Confederation might provoke an inclination towards a controlling national government.

Meese wrote, “The resolution to such fears was, as Madison described it in The Federalist, a government that was neither wholly federal nor wholly national but a composite of the two. …The institutional design was to divide sovereignty between two different levels of political entities, the nation and the states. This would prevent an unhealthy concentration of power in a single government. …Federalism, along with the separation of powers, the Framers thought, would be the basic principled matrix of American constitutional liberty.”

The GOP has rejected this concept and become a proponent of an ever expanding and increasingly costly federal government, making it indistinguishable from liberal Democrats. The contemporary version of the GOP, including President George W. Bush, embrace a penchant for spending taxpayer dollars with such lack of inhibition that the party must think people are growing cash on trees in their backyards. Republicans must transform their party before going to the people with a new agenda for tomorrow. While small government Republicans exist it is impossible to present the party as an agent of change when it passes and the president signs legislation like the “No Child Left Behind Act” and the Medicare prescription drug benefit. When President Bush signed NCLB he ushered in a new era of government spending.

In September 2008, the Heritage Foundation reported, “NCLB has succeeded in one area … expanding federal power. Federal spending on K-12 education has increased by 41 percent since 2001. The Department of Education has been granted new powers to micromanage how states and localities run their schools. The cost of bureaucratic compliance has increased - resulting in more education dollars spent on administration than in the classroom. In all, NCLB increased the regulatory burden on state and local governments by 6.7 million hours annually - approximately $140 million.”

Republicans should promote ways to return educational responsibilities to the states. The same theory applies to the prescription drug issue. Just as education, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, should be a state matter, the federal government should have encouraged the states to experiment with ways to deliver a medication benefit to seniors. Instead, politicians developed a high-priced entitlement program that will further clog Washington’s bureaucratic arteries and drain finite resources. When Congress passed the “Medicare Modernization Act” in 2003 the Bush Administration calculated the cost would be $400 billion between 2004 and 2013. By 2005 the estimate rose to $720 billion. Medicare feels the weight of rising costs. In 1970 roughly 20.4 million people were enrolled in Medicare and by 2007 the number had more than doubled. As more baby-boomers retire that number will balloon, increasing both cost and demand for services.

In October 2008, the Heritage Foundation reported, “While Medicare is the primary source of health care coverage for this population many enrollees have supplemental private sources of coverage, such as employer-provided retiree coverage. However, the demand for new services - such as the addition of a universal prescription-drug benefit in 2003 - crowds out private coverage alternatives. Two-thirds of all Medicare enrollees had prescription-drug coverage from another source before the new drug benefit was enacted. But according to a recent analysis, the new drug benefit resulted in a crowd-out rate of 72 percent. For every seven prescriptions paid for by the government, five would have otherwise been privately financed, resulting in a net gain of only two new prescriptions.”

Heritage warns, absent action, Medicare will be the lone provider, not just the primary source, of health benefits to that population.

Contrary to liberal allegations, the Republican Party does not advance a small government agenda. Republicans and Democrats may argue about priorities but they have one thing in common – when they control the purse they exhaust its contents.

The American government system is unique, featuring a political structure in which 50 states with 50 legislatures can address issues, raise and allocate money and solve problems. Yet over time Washington has increasingly gouged out a place for itself at the state’s tables and shoved them aside. The GOP should oppose this encroachment and call upon Washington politicians to revisit the Constitution and address issues originally assigned to them. It is time for Republicans to remember the federal government is divided into three branches and the division of duties inherent in that system applies to the three levels of government as well – federal, state and local. Each has its own issues to address and responsibilities to meet.

In The Federalist No. 45, James Madison wrote, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

Republicans would do their party and the people a favor by reminding them of this history. If broken government is the ailment and change is the cure then the therapy will be administered in the form of federalism. Whether the Republican Party has the will and wisdom to break out of its status quo comfort zone and offer people meaningful change remains to be seen. If it does, Republicans might inspire people to adopt a genuine attitudinal change, which must precede political change, and get the levels of government working as originally intended.

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Joseph Bell has hosted a radio talk show and is a former editorial writer/columnist for several Connecticut newspapers. A former liberal Democrat, Bell has not been on the conservative side of the aisle for very long. He voted for Clinton/Gore in 1992. Abandoning the convictions that he had held and defended through adolescence and into adulthood was not easy. Sincere soul-searching and a commitment to distinguish fact from fiction compelled him to accept that liberal ideology was bankrupt.

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