Say Anything Blog

Anyone familiar with Forum opinion editor Jack Zaleski’s frequent rantings on the pages of his dying ivory tower circular is usually prepared for the Sunday morning screeds Zaleski is fond of publishing.  But I’ve got to admit, my jaw dropped a bit when Zaleski implied that Republicans wanting the federal government to adhere to the 10th amendment (the last amendment of the original Bill of Rights) are engaged in a secessionist movement.

The North Dakota Legislature, specifically the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, has engaged in a lot of silly stuff this session. Stupid stuff, some would say. But none is as vacuous as the ideological foolishness embodied in a concurrent resolution that invokes the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as proof the federal government is treating the states badly.

Now, I’m not surprised that a big-government liberal like Zaleski who loves the idea of massive, centralized bureaucracy running every aspect of our lives would be no friend of the 10th amendment.  But the reality is that amendment is actually in the Constitution, it was put there for good reasons by our founding fathers, and if crackpots like Zaleski don’t like it perhaps they should start an amendment movement instead of denigrating the people who actually want to follow the law.

Let’s remember that the intent of the 10th amendment was federalism.  It was intended to enshrine in the most supreme law of the land the right of the various sovereign states of America to solve issues and problems not specifically addressed in the constitution in ways approved by the constituencies of the respective states.  Our founding fathers were wise enough to know that a country as large a diverse as America was even at the time of its founding - and its much larger and more diverse today - would be better served by most problems being solved on the local level by political leaders who were closest to the people.  They knew that what worked in Maine might no work in Florida.  Today we know that what works in Virginia or California doesn’t always work in North Dakota.

So our local political leaders are empowered, per the 10th amendment, to set policy not specifically reserved to the federal government by the Constitution.

Sadly, we’ve gotten away from that.  The slow creep of federal control onto the state level has come alongside the creep of federal money into the various states.  As the states take more and more federal money, the federal government ties more and more control to that federal money.  For instance, North Dakota finally had to pass a seat belt law back in the 1980’s in order to keep its federal highway money.  More recently, policies impacting schools and day cares and hospitals and sporting goods dealers are being made at the federal level instead of the state level because the federal government has either threatened to pull money away from federal-funding-addicting state agencies and businesses if they don’t set policy how the feds like it, or because the federal government uses the much-abused “commerce clause” of the Constitution to assert control.

We Americans pride ourselves on our democratic process.  One of the most honored traditions in our society is citizen activism.  One man or one woman standing up and making a difference.  But that’s becoming harder and harder to do because control over everything is slowly filtering away from our local leaders to our national leaders.

Who are much harder to communicate with and influence, as anyone who has ever tried knows.

And all this is happening because of the arrogant attitude of people like Jack Zaleski, who apparently just can’t stand the idea that we might follow the Constitution instead of the pied pipers in our modern political leadership who are more concerned with empowering and enriching themselves than preserving our federalist democracy.

But it’s hard to blame Jack Zaleski.  He’s just following a tradition set by a long line of liberals who like to just ignore the parts of the Constitution they find inconvenient to their political agenda.