Editorial: On Constitution Day, a plea to make federalism “more perfect”

Drum roll, please. It’s Constitution Day. “Our rock and redeemer,” the late columnist Anthony Lewis called it. The written word of a civil religion “that has no state church,” he said.

“For a restless people, it is the prime source of stability, of certainty,” Lewis wrote in 1987, the bicentennial anniversary of the Constitution — and, because of that, you might think we would understand it better.

Yet, here we are, as we have been in the past, often at odds about what this document specifically confers, frequently lacking any semblance of certitude, though always passionate and opinionated about its ideals.

Set aside the long litigated constitutional hot spots of individual rights, how about just the governmental structure the Constitution establishes? We fought a war over that, you may recall.

True, the American Civil War of the mid-19th century welled up from the national genesis, the constitutional compromise crafted over the institution of slavery and the subsequent, fierce dispute regarding its practice and extension into new states.

But, amidst all that, there are also lines of discussion over structure — bright, fundamental lines — that trace core arguments from the ratification of the Constitution right through our national history.

Where should power be best exercised, at the federal or state level?

In the broadest sense, it’s a settled question: the federal government rules. State sovereignty — if the standard definition of “sovereignty” gets applied — has limited, if any, meaning.

Governors and state lawmakers are free to make noises and initiate legal challenges, but when public questions get dire, when emergencies threaten — when push comes to shove — Congress and the federal executive will prevail.

Nevertheless, we remain a pragmatic people and the effectiveness of governance — what works best, what doesn’t — does accord to proximity and scale. Which means we do not generally turn to Congress for trash collection. Nor do we expect the county board to field an army and defend the shoreline.

That said, everything else tends to be up for discussion.

Which is exactly the problem. The lines of authority have been blurred and we do not talk about it much. We hardly talk about it at all, in fact.

All this falls under the general headline of “federalism” and few people pondered the subject more seriously or with greater insight than the late Alice Rivlin, the first director of the Congressional Budget Office and a former president of the American Economic Association.

“The division of responsibility between the states and the federal government was a crucial issue with high emotional and intellectual content,” Rivlin wrote in 1992.

“[The founders'] experience with the English crown made them nervous about lodging too much power in the central government. Life under the Articles of Confederation, however, demonstrated that the national government could not function effectively if its powers were too narrow …”

From that nebulous beginning, it all evolves. You may wish to take up the history books on the details. Suffice to say, since the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt election and the post-Second World War rise of the national security state, there’s been no serious doubt about the dominance of the federal government.

President Ronald Reagan, to his credit, made a stab at organizing things better in the early 1980s and that helped. At least, for a short period, we thought and talked publicly about federalism.

But we got over it. Listen to the debates in Washington and Richmond and see how often the subject arises. Health care. Education. Law enforcement. It’s all a blur over who does what.

Everyone in public life, at all levels, is doing everything and seeking credit for same — that’s exactly what troubled Alice Rivlin. You need only consider America’s haphazard, uncoordinated and often ineffective response to the COVID pandemic to appreciate the stakes involves.

We can do better. Really. In the spirit of Constitution Day, we should do as Alice said: Get this sorted out better.

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