Lawrence Auster
Monday, Aug. 6, 2001

At the same time, Turley, participating in a panel on the 10th Amendment, warned that the forces of centralization are steadily gaining ground in the United States and globally, and that the long-term prospects for localism and freedom are not good. "We can see the power of the states evaporating, not all at once but by a thousand cuts." He described the present situation as "a twilight moment for self-government."

While other speakers on the panel tried to sound as optimistic as its title, "Tenth Amendment Rising? A New Age of Federalism," the substance of their remarks gave only limited grounds for optimism.

For example, Michael Greve of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out that in recent years Congress has successfully limited federal power by refusing to make programs such as Medicaid a privately enforceable right. Formerly, if a state accepted federal funds, it was subject to private suits in federal court to determine how those funds were spent. But since welfare has been made into a block grant instead of a right, the states are free to make such spending decisions on their own.

While this ending of welfare as an entitlement is certainly a praiseworthy reform, it barely seems to touch the surface of the much bigger problem of statism that faces us. Curiously, Greve did not even mention the 10th Amendment, the supposed topic of the discussion as well as the chief constitutional bulwark against unlimited federal power.

According to Turley, the consolidation of the federal government goes back to the 17th Amendment, under which U.S. senators are elected by popular vote instead of by the state legislatures. This constitutional change "cut the cords to the states" that had made U.S. senators dependent on the state legislatures that had elected them. Federal control was also enlarged by the income tax amendment and by increased federal spending that made the states dependent on the federal government as their chief source of revenue.

Tax-and-spend liberals have a vested interest in centralization, said Greve. "If you want to spend money you must get it to the federal level, because if the taxing and spending is at the state level people can move to another state." Conversely, people who just want to be left alone, such as the members of the National Rifle Association, have an interest in keeping issues at the state level, where the government is much weaker.

The panelists agreed that in many cases the state legislatures themselves have been part of the problem. For example, feel-good federal measures such as gun-free school zones are entirely outside the proper powers of Congress, yet it's hard for state legislators to oppose them because they seem so beneficial.

Turley strongly rejected this kind of thinking. "Federalism means more than the specific issues that arise within it," he declared. "We've never been defined as a nation by how we feel about issues but by how we resolve issues."

While conservatives ought to reject Turley's notion that constitutional procedures make up the sum total of our national identity (because so much of our American and Western tradition is not contained in the Constitution), they can surely agree with Turley that constitutional procedures are an indispensable part of our national identity.

Striking another surprising note for a modern liberal, what worried Turley even more than the increasing scope of the national government was globalism, under which "international organizations are dictating the rights of individuals. This concerns me greatly. We are giving power to organizations that are not only separated from us but that are not democratic."

Unfortunately, the panelists gave only a few concrete suggestions on how this increasingly centralized authority could be reined in. Attorney John Armor – a colorful character who wore an 18th-century-style shirt to show his identification with Thomas Jefferson – urged that state representatives take a more active role by testifying before Congress on judicial nominations and by insisting that nominees support federalism.

The states, Armor said, should also talk to each other, just as the colonies did through the Committees of Correspondence during the period leading up to the Declaration of Independence. Turley agreed that the states need to reassert themselves as sovereign units.

Once again, while these are promising ideas, it is questionable that they go to the heart of the statist threat.

For example, the greatest single factor in the undermining of local government over the last 70 years has been the Incorporation Doctrine, which reversed the whole structure of our Constitution by transforming the Bill of Rights into a weapon wielded by federal courts against states and local communities rather than a limitation on Congress alone. Yet when NewsMax asked the panel how there could be any restoration of local government without an attack on the Incorporation Doctrine, they dismissed the issue (which was once a defining issue for strict constitutionalists) as "water under the bridge."

Similarly, when Jonathan Turley was asked if – given his fears of the U.N.'s moves toward an unaccountable global bureaucracy – the U.S. should think of pulling out of the U.N., he replied that such a step would only harm America. "The other nations would band together to damage U.S. interests around the world, to hurt U.S. businesses. Years ago we could have withdrawn from the U.N., and it would have collapsed, but now the U.N. is too strong."

The only option, he said, was for the U.S. to try to limit the U.N.'s growing power from within.

Let us pray that Turley is not right. If America's only practical option is continued membership in an organization that is so clearly set on an agenda leading step by step to global government, what realistic hope for freedom is there?

Lawrence Auster can be reached at lawrence.auster@att.net.

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