[From article]
At the end of the nineteenth century, the British historian Lord Acton credited America’s division of power with producing “a community more powerful, more prosperous, more intelligent, and more free than any other the world has seen.”
[. . .]
The cooperative model began to break down in the 1960s, as Congress attached ever more specific and intrusive conditions to federal aid. The Highway Beautification Act of 1965, for example, told states to follow federal rules for regulating billboards or lose 10 percent of their highway funding. By the 1970s, such conditional grants, combined with unfunded mandates—marching orders that the federal government issues but doesn’t pay for—created the model that persists to this day: coercive federalism.
[. . .]
It’s troubling enough that in the academy, “coercion” has become a neutral label for what the federal government does every day. Far more troubling, however, is that the constitutionality of coercive federalism rests upon a legal fiction: that federal programs don’t infringe on state sovereignty because they are voluntary.
[. . .]
Koch conceded that he had supported such mandates as a congressman. But as mayor, he had come to realize the folly of Washington bureaucrats’ micromanaging local affairs.
http://www.city-journal.org/2013/23_3_federalism.html
ADAM FREEDMAN
Federalism, Red and Blue
Both Right and Left are telling Washington to back off.
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