Horse Sense: Separation of Powers Resides with States

When I was a teen-ager in Houston, our Congressman was Bill Archer. He would eventually become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee before retiring from Congress. I am still grateful to him for his early mentorship and especially, for his clear and unequivocal way of describing the proper relations between state and federal governments. Statesmen can and do contribute vitally to our way of life, as they help transmit cultural and political institutions intact to the next generation, whereas, politicians contribute the very opposite effect. You’d like to have term limits placed on politicians and keep the statesmen. And I suppose the means exists to do so—called elections, these depend on a people who can discern difference, and who care enough to participate. You’ll have another opportunity in November, so please get ready. Now back to the subject at hand…. A vertical separation of power exists, every bit like the horizontal one between Congress and the President and the Supreme Court. If the separation of powers between Congress and the President is in jeopardy today, which I believe it to be, a separation of powers between the Federal Government and the several States is virtually nonexistent. In practice, States these days amount to so many rubber stamps, dependencies on the largesse and will of the Federal Government. Power resides with Washington, in case you had not perceived it; moreover, the accretion of power continues uninterrupted in that direction since “conservative” Republicans have been in charge.
Notwithstanding, a balance of power ought to result from the dual sovereignty inherent in state and national governments according to American political tradition and the Constitution of our Fathers. While dual sovereignty is tricky business to be sure, it works because the powers ascribed to each level are generally defined and separate in the Constitution: some powers are enumerated and delegated to the national government, while everything else simply isn’t. This system of dual-sovereignty is called federalism; and it is the most unique aspect in our system of representative government, a theory put to its form and contributed by the Father of the Constitution, James Madison. Federalism is also, arguably, the most important aspect in our system of representative government, in terms of preventing tyranny by the chief executive or indeed by any single branch of the national government. Federalism and dual-sovereignty, understood in this way, are what the most enlightened and thoughtful conservatives have referred to, whenever they spoke of or invoked the term “States Rights” since Reconstruction. Unfortunately, historical scholarship has often lacked rigorous analysis, and has conveyed less understanding. Terms have been shrouded or worse, they have been intentionally de-legitimized by liberal historians and an intellectual class of puppeteers. For those seeking a dictatorship by design—whether consolidated national democracy, or unitary approaches to every problem under heaven, States Rights and the constitutional edifice of federalism are at the heart of what must be destroyed. Enemies of liberty have crosshairs on that target.
States Rights and federalism are routinely conflated with the cause of segregation and other gross violations of civil rights, while this literally mistakes a rubric for the actual substance. It’s a really big baby that gets thrown out with the bathwater, in other words! You most certainly may and indeed should, excise legally enforced racial discrimination. But you must do so without removing the very basis for a continued, mutually respectful and covenantal relationship twixt States and the Federal Government on other matters. We have amended the Constitution and may enforce provisions according to the amendments; moreover, I would argue that social evolution has at last caught up with the vision in the Declaration, even if facts haven’t in every single case. We must hope that such evolution has not caught up too late, in order to form new political coalitions that will redress the terrible imbalance of power that now exists between the States and Federal Government. Education is, as with so many things, a start. Today, however, if young people come away from a civics class with any appreciation for “checks and balances,” it is always for the separation of powers inherent between three co-equal branches of the federal or national government. While extremely important, they learn little to nothing of federalism and have no similar regard for that same concept of “checks and balances” applied vertically. Yet it is the vertical check and balance, which precludes a radical concentration of power in a single person or branch of government. It is the vertical check and balance that forestalls a top-down implementation of tyranny, and which enables States to reach like-minded States for moral and political support, and material assistance to resist Leviathan. In short, in the absence of federalism and the separation of powers it implies, the last vestiges of the American Republic will languish, until restored at length by the people or shorn completely by tyrants.
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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary. Email: wes@wesriddle.com.