Comments on: Laboratories of Liberalism:Fred Thompson and the Inadequacies of Federalism

By: Boonton

Boonton — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:59:43 +0000

Good point. The Schiavo fiasco demonstrated not that the right is about protecting this system of spheres but is the movement to shatter them. Notice what was demanded? Not a law saying feeding tubes could not be refused. Not even a law saying a feeding tube could only be refused by the actual person who needs it. No a special law that applied to just one particular case, Terry Schiavo, that was basically an attempt to second guess the state judicial system. Likewise the right did the same thing years earlier with Elián González. When you don’t like the result of the ’spheres’ (such as a father wants to live with his son in his home in Cuba rather than the US) just smash them. At the end the only sphere that really counts with them is the Federal Gov’t controlled by them or whatever lesser sphere they are able to take command of.

By: Robert Duquette

Robert Duquette — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 03:29:17 +0000

One of the most disheartening and shameful scenes of the last decade was to see so-called conservatives claim that the Terri Schiavo case should have been left solely to the state of Florida. The charitable view is to assume that had they known that a woman was being killed by the state without due process of law, they would have sided with justice over judicially mandated involuntary euthanasia. The less generous opinion is that they simply haven’t considered how federalism relates to conservative principles.
Joe’s rhetoric demonstrates why the social conservatives were so out of step with the American people with respect to the Schiavo affair. The Florida state court was not mandating involuntary euthanasia, it was adjudicating Terri Schiavo’s will, as represented by her husband Michael, regarding her wishes in the event that she devolve into a persistent vegetative state. The great majority of the nation got this. Where social conservatives saw a murderous state executing innocent, helpless citizens, most Americans saw in the overreach of the conserbatives an intrusive state forcing its own religious preferences onto the private, personal life and death decisions of people like them. That Terry Schiavo would have told her husband that she wouldn’t want to be kept alive in such a state didn’t strike ordinary Americans as bizarre or farfetched. Ordinary people thought “of course, pull the plug. That’s what I would want. I don’t want to live like that!”
The outcome of the Schiavo affair wasn’t a popular call for laws to protect future Terry Schiavo’s it was a rush by many thousands of people to prepare living wills.
Your list of spheres leaves out one very important spheres: the individual sphere. Until you sc’s get a grip on the importance and proper sovereignty of that sphere, you won’t be very successful at the democracy game.

By: Robert Duquette

Robert Duquette — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 03:00:59 +0000

I’m not a federalist booster, but I’ve noticed that social conservatives will promote federalism when it suits their values and decry it when it doesn’t.
I think the most ridiculous application of federal principles by social conservatives is in regards to the First Amendmentte establishment and free exercise clauses. As popularly understood it protects religious freedom, but what it was intended at it’s inception was to prevent Congress from making a national establishment of religion, but allowing states to make their own establishments of state churches, and denying religious freedom as they saw fit within their own state territories. Applying the no establishment clause to the states was the only way to truly ensure that freedom of religion was a right of all Americans. What does it matter to someone whose religious liberty was denied by state laws that his liberty was not being infringed at the national level?
Yet religious conservatives, under the cry of religious liberty, continue to protest this as a usurpation of state powers by an activist court. How is religious liberty served by allowing local governments to dictate what prayers schoolchildren will recite?

By: Chuck

Chuck — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:57:29 +0000

Check out the hit piece on Fred Thompson, including a few things the media never talks about. To read it go to thirdrailradio.blogspot.com

By: Protagonist

Protagonist — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 20:32:29 +0000

(1) Federal government controls people
(2) State governments controls people
(3) Federal government controls state governments
(4) State governments controls federal government
(5) People control state government
(6) People control federal government
Modern liberalism greatly emphasizes (1)(2) and (3), tacitly downplays (5) and (6), and rejects (4) as anacronistic and dangerous.
Thompson’s “Frederalism” downplays (1), is ambiguous or neutral about (2), emphasizes (5) and (6), wants to revive (4)(e.g. repeal of 17th Amendment), and considers (3) unconstitutional and dangerous (e.g. Printz v. U.S.).
It’s (2) that’s the sticking point and the measure of a true libertarian. Thompson needs to say that his federalism will mean less overall government from the states, and (3) will be used to keep states from harming its people: Federal government controls state governments controlling people. Otherwise, Federalism is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Amistad.

By: jpe

jpe — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 20:08:33 +0000

Carter claims conservativism trumps federalism. His critique boils down to the simple proposition that he’s not a federalism, and thus disagrees with federalism.

By: William Oliver

William Oliver — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 17:45:31 +0000

The comments on this faux respect for federalism remind me of similar faux statements “respecting” freedom of speech. There are lots of people who
believe in freedom of speech as long as it doesn’t offend *them* too badly. Then, of course, it becomes
a form of “violence” or “obscene” or “hate speech” or whatever it takes to suppress it.
Similarly, everybody on the right seems to be a fan of “federalism” except when it comes to issues that they care about. Then, all of a sudden, the federal
government is where it’s at.
Federalism *is* a conservative value, a value of *political” not *social” conservatives. Social conservatives seem to want to pretend they are the
only real conservatives, but they are not.
Federalism is important because it is the only way to allow any freedom in sparsely populated areas. Without
it, there’s no reason to bother with anybody in states like Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, etc. having a vote. People
should be allowed to govern themselves, and that means having governmental power pushed as locally as possible.
Like any liberty, however, that sometimes means that you have to allow people to make decisions you don’t
agree with and live their lives in a way you don’t approve of. That kind of liberty is one that statists,
whether they are socially conservative or liberal, cannot abide with.

By: Maduka

Maduka — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:40:07 +0000

This is off-tangent.
I have a question to ask (I got this from a black conservative website).
It is not that black Americans are incapable of understanding the principle of limited government, it’s that our country has a long, and terrible record of applying the principal of limited government to black Americans.
………………………
How could conservatives ever hope to transmit the conservative idea of limited government to African American voters, whose historical advances in this society have been accompanied at every major turn by the presence of the Federal government and its various forms of interventionist liberalism?
How do you transmit the principle of limited government to people who have known anything but?
I would love to hear your suggestions on this. All black conservatives grapple with this problem.

By: Boonton

Boonton — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 22:22:42 +0000

I’ll stick with your parental authority analogy. Let’s say that mom and dad decide to torture their child. Does the state have no authority to intervene? What if they take their kids out of school and provide no alternate education? What if they deny medical treatment to their kids?
Then they would be stepping outside their sphere into one that the state has jurisdiction over. The state could intervene if they were being abusive but it couldn’t intervene just to make their bedtime 10PM EVEN IF you could show a 8PM bedtime was unfair!
Likewise this is NOT an area where the Federal Government would normally be able to intervene except if unusual circumstances were taken place where the Fed. gov’t and not the states would have jurisdiction (say on an army base, maybe in an embassy?)
To pretend that families, marriages, businesses, etc. are someone separate from society and cannot be regulated by the state is to live in a fantasy land.
They can but only to the degree that such regulation is inside the state’s sphere. Abuse would be but not bedtimes unless you could show in a particular case a bedtime was abusive in some manner. Likewise there’s a limit on business regulation. Maybe it’s pretty extensive but even there the state can’t micromanage every business.
To pretend that a state government is equal in authority to the federal government is to ignore McCullough v. Maryland, the Civil War, and the Little Rock Crisis.
There are areas where the state has authority, where the Federal gov’t has authority and areas where they share authority. In the Little Rock Crisis, for example, the state did not have the authority to violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. I believe one state, though, responded by closing ALL public schools. While the Federal Gov’t could force integration it couldn’t force the state to provide public schools.

By: ex-preacher

ex-preacher — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 22:09:09 +0000

I think the separate spheres argument is bizarre because it is blind to reality. I’ll stick with your parental authority analogy. Let’s say that mom and dad decide to torture their child. Does the state have no authority to intervene? What if they take their kids out of school and provide no alternate education? What if they deny medical treatment to their kids?
To pretend that families, marriages, businesses, etc. are someone separate from society and cannot be regulated by the state is to live in a fantasy land.
To pretend that a state government is equal in authority to the federal government is to ignore McCullough v. Maryland, the Civil War, and the Little Rock Crisis.
Certainly, there are spheres where these various entities operate, but they are not independent of state regulation and they are clearly not equal in authority when the two collide.