Since the Great Depression and the inauguration of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the vast majority of public policymakers and voters have held an unreflective conviction that problems are best addressed by Congress and the president on a nationwide basis rather than by individual states embracing variegated approaches.
The idea of federalism - that is, a preference for independent state policy-making and sovereignty in lieu of nationwide rules ordained by Congress, the president, or federal regulatory agencies - virtually disappeared from political debate during the heyday of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program. In the 1960s, the federal government became the dominant policy force in a broad spectrum of fields traditionally subject to state control: manpower training, welfare, medical care for the impoverished or aged, education, housing assistance, local development of blighted areas, and voting laws. The federal government, Johnson and his colleagues tacitly assumed, was uniquely endowed with the wisdom and financial resources to eliminate poverty or other untoward conditions in society.
However, evidence accumulated in the aftermath of the Johnson presidency casting grave doubt on that assumption. Federal manpower training programs proved exorbitantly costly, and only a few obtained permanent employment. The fundamental causes of poverty seemed untouched by federal welfare assistance, while the number of illegitimate births, teenage pregnancies, and female-headed households among the poor mushroomed. The costs of medical care for the aged, the indigent, and others, skyrocketed, far outpacing the rate of inflation. Federal education expenditures produced no gains and some apparent loss in student achievement. Federal public housing projects for the poor, symbolized by the dramatic dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis, seemed to create more problems than they ameliorated. The federal Model Cities Program to assist local development failed in its mission.
This substantial evidence of malfunctioning laws should have suggested the possibility that perhaps the federal government, despite its good intentions, lacked institutional attributes necessary to fashion enlightened public policy. That possibility, however, has never entered serious public debate in the 18 years since Johnson left office. Members of Congress and presidents, irrespective of political party affiliation, discovered political rewards in an ever-expanding public policy jurisdiction that blinded them to evidence of federal incompetence.
The more power that flowed to Washington, D.C., the greater were the opportunities to serve constituents and thus the greater the political advantages of incumbency, exceptionally important to the modern lifetime politician.
When President Reagan assumed office in 1981, he pledged to restore power to the states and revitalize principles of federalism. Yet, countervailing political incentives and the entrenched conventional wisdom of the superiority of federal institutions have confounded Reagan's intentions.
During his presidency, Congress has enacted statutes cutting to the heart of traditional state prerogatives: a Social Security amendment prohibiting state employees from opting out of the system; speed limit and drinking age directives to states as a condition for receiving
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