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States Rights
- Feb 2, 2010 at 11:57 AM
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- Comments (15) Total Views (634) Everyone can see this journal post.
When I was in high school, I had to take a class called POD - Principles of Democracy. This was not an optional class. We were automatically enrolled in it for our Senior year. It was one of those classes that, if we didn't take it or didn't pass it, we didn't graduate. My Senior year happened to be an election year and our teacher took great pains to impress upon us the necessity of understanding not just how elections work in this country but how our democratic republic works. He felt that we could not become educated voters unless we understood the entire system. POD turned out to be one of my favorite classes of my Senior year.
All of the hot topics this week seem somehow related to States Rights, even if the posters don't necessarily know it. I've seen questions about why states can have radically different laws from each other, why some states are voting to limit federal government involvement in health care insurance, and several other similar issues.
This all comes down to the concept of States Rights. Our country was designed in such a way that the rights of individual states supercede the rights of the federal government. This was done intentionally because the men who wrote the Constitution did not want the United States to become like the monarchal countries they'd immigrated from. They did not want to create a country in which the person (or persons in the case of our Congress) at the top had all the power and control. If the federal government had all the power over the states, then the United States would not be any different from the western European countries the fathers of our country came from. So they said that the individual states had the right to determine what was best for the people of that particular state.
The right of self determination hasn't always worked perfectly in practice. For example, the federal government essentially forced all the states to enact the same limits on drinking age by threatening to take away federal highway dollars if the states didn't all set drinking age to the same age. But in recent years there has been more and more of a movement to corral the power of the federal government, with states reasserting their right to determine what is best for the people of their state.
Someone asked last night what makes us united when our laws vary wildly from state to state. What makes us the United States is an idea. Laws do not bind a nation together. The idea of "we the people" does bind us together. Some of you probably remember the Freedom Train. It was a few years before I was born but my husband remembers going to see it. All of the documents important to our nation's history (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights, other documents and objects as well) were put on a train and toured around the country during the bicentenial year. I think the idea was to remind people of where we came from and the ideas that brought this nation into being.
I think it's time for a new Freedom Train, complete with a self guided tour through the concepts and ideas that make the United States unique, even among the other democracy on this planet.
Comments:
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the reminder.
I didn't forget but thanks for the reminder
If Lincoln had just enforced states rights we wouldn't have had to fight the Civil War.
It is a truely beautiful concept is it not? Diversity, even in laws, does not mean that we are unable to unify as a country. I love this country and one of the reasons is the ability of states to really represent what the people living there need or desire.
Great post.
AMEN!! Thank you for this post. I try and try to explain it to people but it is like beating a dead horse. They don't understand and, to be honest, I don't think they want to. If they do then it means they have to start taking responsibility for their actions.
Sharing with my college student, he's studying this very thing now!
Thanks for posting.
Yes .... our founding fathers were geniuses! If only Americans would study them.
Eilish, the conspiracy theorist in me says that civics has been dropped from public school cirricullum on purpose. People who don't understand how our system works are more easily led in the direction the government wants them to go.
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People forget the bloodiest war on our own soil, meaning the most number of our own casualities, was over states rights. And, yes, I am talking about the Civil War here.
- MidnightSun327
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