Let’s Do This: For Once Something Is Actually About States’ Rights

This land is your land
This land is my land

We have a history here in the United States of claiming that some … things … were about the rights of the states against the federal government when really they were about … something else.

Yeah; that.

This is not about that.

You want states’ rights? Let’s get some states’ rights all up in this place.

So, for those of you who don’t know, in the United States the heirarchy of laws goes like this:

federal constitution -> federal law -> state constitutions -> state law

This basically sets the entire federal government above anything a state can do. Which is fine, if what you’re after is a single centrally-governed State.

But that’s not what we were supposed to be.

It’s even there in the name: federal government. The United States was supposed to be a federation of sovereign states, so that right there is a pretty serious screwup.

(Given the folks who came up with it, though, it’s probably intentional.)

And lots of us have noticed; and many of us are unhappy about it …

This one’s easy.

The fix for this is actually really simple; all you have to do is move a few things around and you get:

federal constitution -> state constitutions -> federal law -> state law

That is the country this claims to be, and that many of us already think we’re living in.

Yeah; there’s some bad in with the good on this one.

In the short term, this would definitely result in several states immediately banning abortion via constitutional amendment, along with quite a few adding straight marriage clauses. The entire south would definitely start messing with their elections laws even more too,

And North Carolina would almost certainly add a constitutional provision about where you can pee.

But here’s the thing: in the long run those could be worked out since they all probably conflict with the federal constitution as well as conflicting with federal law.

And in the meantime the majority of the population in this country lives in states that could use this as an opportunity to fix a whole bunch of urgent problems that the federal government is blocking solutions to (California and car emmissions standards comes to mind).