4 ms·

IMO states' rights is a pretty nerdy issue if you take a step back and think about it. Very few people are such nerds.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
That mostly because we've become accustomed to the federal government meddling in internal affairs more than it is supposed to. The union is supposed to be akin to the EU but without international sovereignty for states.
- vmception 5y ago
  Who woulda foreseen that all commerce would be interstate commerce, allowing the federal government to control all facets of life
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    Yeah in 1776 the US was frankly a backwater. In 2022 it is an global economic superpower. Smart people wrote the Constitution but they were not prescient.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > The union is supposed to be akin to the EU but without international sovereignty for states. Actually, not really. The EU is, in political science terms, a confederation (to the degree that it's a state and not a supranational organization in the first place). The constitution envisioned the US as a federal state (the first one ever), in explicit contradistinction to the confederation that preceded it, as well as other then-existing confederations. That the constitution was ratified meant that the people of the time agreed to disband a confederation and move to a federal state. The primary difference between a federal state and a confederation is that in a federal state, both the federal government and constituent states have their own loci of authority and power, as opposed to a confederation (where the federal government exists at the behest of the states and derives all of its power from those states) or a unitary state (where the reverse is true). As the US was the first example of this kind of government, the US Constitution has several weird quirks that now seem anachronistic (e.g., the federal territory not having representation) that probably helped stabilize the government in its early years. Arguments that center on what the Founding Fathers actually intended for the country fall flat for me because a) how do you know what they actually intended versus what you want to say that they intended, b) what makes you think that a government that made sense for the US 250 years ago would make equal sense today, and c) if you look up the history of treaty-making, you'll find that the first person to bin the original intended procedures of how the government would work was George Washington, barely a year into his first term in office.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    > Arguments that center on what the Founding Fathers actually intended for the country fall flat for me because a) how do you know what they actually intended I think it's further than that: regardless what they intended, it's very easy to see the opposing views of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists via their respective Papers. It's pretty clear that some of the founders wanted a strong central government, and some wanted a weaker central government with stronger states. Big surprise, politicians disagree on fundamental issues. But it's also pretty clear that the Federalists "won", and quickly. Very early in the 1800s we see the federal government asserting itself much more strongly than the Anti-Federalists wanted. So I think it's just flat-out wrong for someone to say something like "the founding fathers wanted a small, relatively weak central government". Sure, some of them did, but many did not, and, well... the small-central-government faction lost.
    - salawat 5y ago
      The thing people forget though, is that fight continues to this very day, and it is with We The People that the right to determine and change where that balance sits. Frankly, I think the Federal Government is just aggregating greater and greater degrees of power over time, and becoming a political sledgehammer reached for out of expedience.
      - kelnos 5y ago
        That's a fair point, but I don't think either major political party seriously wants a smaller central government. Democrats explicitly want to provide more social services, and Republicans claim to want smaller government, but what they seem to actually want (through their actions) is less regulation, but with the government itself not really much smaller. Certainly some parties -- like libertarians -- would actually enact policies to make the central government truly smaller were they to come into power, but they are guaranteed not to with our electoral system as it is. While in theory We The People have the right to determine all this, in practice we have little choice, it seems.
  - etchalon 5y ago
jmyeet 5y ago
"States' rights" is now a loaded term because it is inextricably intertwined with the historical revisionism around the Civil War. Basically, some white supremacists argue the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights. It wasn't. There's plenty of historical evidence and facts to debunk this. But even if true, the particular right in question was to own black people as property.

That mostly because we've become accustomed to the federal government meddling in internal affairs more than it is supposed to. The union is supposed to be akin to the EU but without international sovereignty for states.

vmception 5y ago
Who woulda foreseen that all commerce would be interstate commerce, allowing the federal government to control all facets of life
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Yeah in 1776 the US was frankly a backwater. In 2022 it is an global economic superpower. Smart people wrote the Constitution but they were not prescient.
jcranmer 5y ago
> The union is supposed to be akin to the EU but without international sovereignty for states. Actually, not really. The EU is, in political science terms, a confederation (to the degree that it's a state and not a supranational organization in the first place). The constitution envisioned the US as a federal state (the first one ever), in explicit contradistinction to the confederation that preceded it, as well as other then-existing confederations. That the constitution was ratified meant that the people of the time agreed to disband a confederation and move to a federal state. The primary difference between a federal state and a confederation is that in a federal state, both the federal government and constituent states have their own loci of authority and power, as opposed to a confederation (where the federal government exists at the behest of the states and derives all of its power from those states) or a unitary state (where the reverse is true). As the US was the first example of this kind of government, the US Constitution has several weird quirks that now seem anachronistic (e.g., the federal territory not having representation) that probably helped stabilize the government in its early years. Arguments that center on what the Founding Fathers actually intended for the country fall flat for me because a) how do you know what they actually intended versus what you want to say that they intended, b) what makes you think that a government that made sense for the US 250 years ago would make equal sense today, and c) if you look up the history of treaty-making, you'll find that the first person to bin the original intended procedures of how the government would work was George Washington, barely a year into his first term in office.
- kelnos 5y ago
  > Arguments that center on what the Founding Fathers actually intended for the country fall flat for me because a) how do you know what they actually intended I think it's further than that: regardless what they intended, it's very easy to see the opposing views of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists via their respective Papers. It's pretty clear that some of the founders wanted a strong central government, and some wanted a weaker central government with stronger states. Big surprise, politicians disagree on fundamental issues. But it's also pretty clear that the Federalists "won", and quickly. Very early in the 1800s we see the federal government asserting itself much more strongly than the Anti-Federalists wanted. So I think it's just flat-out wrong for someone to say something like "the founding fathers wanted a small, relatively weak central government". Sure, some of them did, but many did not, and, well... the small-central-government faction lost.
  - salawat 5y ago
    The thing people forget though, is that fight continues to this very day, and it is with We The People that the right to determine and change where that balance sits. Frankly, I think the Federal Government is just aggregating greater and greater degrees of power over time, and becoming a political sledgehammer reached for out of expedience.
    - kelnos 5y ago
      That's a fair point, but I don't think either major political party seriously wants a smaller central government. Democrats explicitly want to provide more social services, and Republicans claim to want smaller government, but what they seem to actually want (through their actions) is less regulation, but with the government itself not really much smaller. Certainly some parties -- like libertarians -- would actually enact policies to make the central government truly smaller were they to come into power, but they are guaranteed not to with our electoral system as it is. While in theory We The People have the right to determine all this, in practice we have little choice, it seems.
- etchalon 5y ago

jmyeet 5y ago

"States' rights" is now a loaded term because it is inextricably intertwined with the historical revisionism around the Civil War. Basically, some white supremacists argue the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights. It wasn't. There's plenty of historical evidence and facts to debunk this. But even if true, the particular right in question was to own black people as property.