Richmond Times Dispatch: Give States a Tool to Check Federal Power
This proposal would allow acts of Congress to be repealed with the votes of 2/3 of the state legislatures.
Proposals like these fail to grasp that most of the time, we’re one country, not 50 states. There may have been a time when having 50 sovereign, largely independent states made sense to govern such a large area. Not anymore. We fight as one country, trade as one country, and conduct foreign policy as one country.
States are looking out for their bottom lines, which is understandable, but if we gave states the veto power, we’d have nothing but a lot of unpaved roads. Those unfunded mandates are beneficial for the country as a whole, but awful for individual states. The federal government’s constituency needs to remain the people, and not the states, of the United States.
