I wish the states' rights people had meant it

It's hard to argue for federalism under Trump, but we still have to try

(Image by Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

I never really believed anyone who claimed that they wanted abortion to be decided by the states. Most anti-abortion advocates believe that aborting a fetus is morally identical to strangling a baby in the crib. I don’t really think that anyone believes that whether murder should be legal or not should be decided on a state-by-state basis.

So I wasn’t surprised to learn that anti-abortion advocates were hoping the Trump administration would use the FDA to crack down on medication abortions. After all, they remain committed to the Hyde Amendment, which tries to restrict funding to any organization that offers abortions. That one was never really about states’ rights.

But I have been kind of sad to learn that the interest in states’ rights was always so thin even on issues where the state-by-state approach seems entirely appropriate. Where, for instance, are all the conservatives arguing that “I chose to live in a state that didn’t impose COVID restrictions, but states do have the right to make these decisions,” or “I think it’s a terrible idea to allow teenagers to delay puberty, but these decisions ought to be made by parents and doctors with state-level oversight” or “it’s not really any of my business how Californians think bathrooms ought to work”?

“This ought to be decided at the state level, not at the federal level” used to be a popular conservative line of argument.

Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that legalized same-sex marriage, was a mistake, Ted Cruz argued, because “Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states.”

How schools handled transgender students? Trump’s first education secretary, Betsy DeVos, said that in issuing any federal rules at all, the Obama administration had overstepped by adopting a “one-size fits all federal government approach, top down approach to issues that are best dealt with and solved at a personal level, at a local level.”

Mehmet Oz, Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said he opposed federal regulation of abortion but favored state-level regulation.

The “states’ rights” arguments have always been treated with a great deal of suspicion from the left. To say that this suspicion is warranted is to grossly understate things. “States’ rights” are often invoked to defend the Confederacy, so for many people, they are inextricably linked to one of the most enormous and corrosive evils in which America ever participated.

The state’s right to do what is a very reasonable question. There are some rights that are so fundamental that we wouldn’t allow states to deny them.

But I think that there are some cases where the “states’ rights” approach is correct. So it’s been a shame to realize now that conservatives control the federal government and the Supreme Court how very few of them actually meant it — even on issues where the state-by-state approach seems entirely appropriate.

I like laboratories of democracy

It’s tempting to see politics as an implementation problem. A problem where we already know what to do and all of the hard work is just in actually getting it done.