States’ Rights Vs Conservative Trump

The world is full of oxymoron these days. Recall the definition of the term – the presence of contradictory ideas in the same phrase, sentence or thought making the overall statement incorrect. And yes there is a plural form of the word and it is not oxymorons but rather oxymora.

And yes, of course there are oxymora aplenty!

States’ Rights is a concept of governance theory in which federalism of a central government shares powers with component segments of the same nation, in the case of America, the fifty states comprising the nation. The US Constitution reserves rights to the states and assigns all other rights of governance to the Federal Government.

Conservatives have long argued that states have rights that stand in peril of an overambitious federal government or its officials. They have feared a take over of states’ rights by federal authorities for generations, even before the Constitution was approved. They are still arguing the concept.

A recent example of this is marriage equality. States claimed the right to define this solely on their own local standards. Federal courts disagreed and claimed equality was a standard best settled on all citizens of the nation. Each state could not arbitrarily deny this equality on their own. So states’ rights were trimmed a bit with that decision. It's a constitutional issue.

Abortion rights is yet another example of tempestuous skirmishes regarding states’ rights.

And yet our current president trump contends states do not retain the rights to manage police matters in their own cities. Else why would Attorney General Jeff Sessions threaten federal policing grant funds to cities as punishment for Sanctuary City status?

Make no mistake: this is a states’ rights issue. The states and the municipalities do manage their territories as effectively as they can with their own resources. When citizen safety faces special threats or negative trends, pooling resources helps attend to such problems. In special cases federal assistance is appropriate to defend against escalations of lawlessness not in the control of local authorities. Help can be requested and is usually granted.

Now comes the heavy arm of the federal government to say “do as I wish or feel the financial consequences.” This is exactly what the conservatives have long argued the federal government can do to threaten the comity of the US Constitution.

Isn’t that interesting. The conservatives using their own argument to attack states’ rights!

Sanctuary cities have nothing to do with escalations of lawlessness threatening the safety of citizens. It has to do with the ideological argument that a broken immigration system should not be a burden to the powerless among us.

Ideology run amok. In the Day of Trump. Interesting, indeed! Is he a conservative? Or a liberal? Or an oligarch? Or a dictator? Take your pick. It could be anything these days. Dictionaries are evidently losing their authority. Or are they?

March 30, 2017