Washington Divided

For John, BLUF:  Let People, to the extent they can, do it themselves.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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From the Instapundit we have this comment on an article from The Washington Examiner, looking at gridlock in DC.

PHILIP KLEIN:  Washington is divided because it has abandoned federalism.

There has been a lot of handwringing in recent years about how divided Washington is, and how it’s difficult for the parties to come together on anything. But the reality is that the states are divided among themselves.

The architecture of the Constitution offers a natural solution to this problem. Instead of trying to solve every issue at the national level, power should be shifted back to the states. Those states whose residents are willing to pay higher taxes for more government services should be free to do so, as should states whose residents are willing to forgo government benefits in favor of lower taxes. Under such a system, instead of bitterly hashing out every issue in Washington, Congress could be focusing on a limited range of issues.

It’s clear that liberals don’t see things this way. But it should be no surprise that their efforts to impose one-size-fits-all solutions across the nation encounter so much resistance.

And, neither party is immune to this problem, as Professor Glenn Reynolds notes at the end of the blog post:

They rediscover federalism whenever the GOP controls the White House and Congress, but they quickly forget it upon regaining power at the national level. The GOP is only moderately better.

The key point, for me, is that when one has a problem that can't be solved by the group at hand, perhaps it is time to send it back down to a lower level, back where the rubber meets the road.  Too often we are trying to apply a "one size fits all" solution to a complex problem, made more complex because it is not the same problem in Caribou, Maine, as it is in Laguna Niguel, California.  Allowing different areas to solve their part of the problem on their own is the genius of federalism, of our US Constitution.  There is gridlock because people in Washington think they have the single solution to everyone's problem.  And they don't.

Regards  —  Cliff