Funny isn’t it? As the states rights debate gains more attention, the room gets too crowded for the actual Tenther viewpoint. Take for instance “Meddling for Morality: Republicans are for states’ rights – when it suits them,” a column in The Economist.
The writer largely gives Democrats a break but does mention them in the second to last paragraph (within parentheses). Credit is always due to mainstreamers who nail the GOP on its selectivity about where to draw the line between state and federal power. Nullifying ObamaCare is popular while simultaneously abortion restrictions ought to be legislated from D.C. say the phony conservatives, but couldn’t the author have gone a bit further?
Trevor Lyman of the Liberty Crier took The Economist to task for failing to mention Democrats as equally guilty for paying lip service to great nationalism while 17 states are actively disobeying Supreme Court medical marijuana proclamations. But there is something more sinister, something more deeply flawed in The Economist columnist’s approach.
It’s one thing to call out Republicans (and Democrats) as inconsistent but then to advocate for this?!:
“The only principle that stands up to scrutiny…is efficiency: states should take on anything they can handle more cheaply and with better results than the federal government. That, more or less, seems to have been the approach adopted by the drafters of the constitution.”
How can such a moderate on the Constitution have the gall to complain when fakes and charlatans abuse or flout the 10th Amendment? The Tenther view is the originalist, Constitutionalist one which neatly appropriates specific duties to the feds in Article 1, Section 8, leaving all other dreams of bureaucracy to the several states. Instead of entertaining the principle of nullification, the moderate points to the civil war and drops the subject immediately.
It’s remarkable that the discussion has reached such mainstream heights, but when it’s argued between demagogues and politicians how is liberty promoted except out of convenience or happenstance? Thankfully, those same opinion molders can’t put the conversation back in the attic now. Conventional wisdom says history is on their side, but common sense reveals that time is on ours.
