A couple of points on federalism, if I may. The first comes courtesy of Romneycare:
Newly obtained White House records provide fresh details on how senior Obama administration officials used Mitt Romney's landmark health-care law in Massachusetts as a model for the new federal law, including recruiting some of Romney's own health care advisers and experts to help craft the act now derided by Republicans as “Obamacare.”
The records, gleaned from White House visitor logs reviewed by NBC News, show that senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006, when the Republican presidential candidate was governor of Massachusetts. One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama, the records show.
Ouch. This isn't something we didn't already suspect, but the extent to which the White House learned from Romney's plan is going to be a slight problem for the GOP base. Romney keeps trying to dispose of the issue by explaining it as perfectly legitimate federalism. But you don't get a pass on a bad idea just because it was tried at the state level instead of the federal level. Having our "laboratories of democracy" should result in good ideas being copied by other states, not bad ideas copied by Washington.
And now Rick Perry:
I was much more offended by the alacrity with which Perry, who announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination a week later, abandoned his avowed federalist principles to embrace the legislative agenda of the Christian right. It took less than a week.
“Our friends in New York,” Perry told GOP donors in Aspen on July 22, “passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That's New York, and that's their business, and that's fine with me. That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business.”
It soon became clear that Perry, who wrote a book championing federalism, does not really believe in the 10th Amendment. In a July 28 interview, he assured Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, that he supports amending the Constitution to declare that “marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.” So much for letting states define marriage as they see fit.
If you really believe in the federalist system, you have to accept the idea that some states are going to come up with ideas you don't like. The more you opt for cafeteria federalism -- picking and choosing what you put on the tray of state control -- the less successful will be the effort to keep federal power at a sensible level.
