Posted by
flagwaver on Tuesday, February 24, 2009 12:37:22 PM
Back when Monday Night Football was new "Dandy" Don Meredith, one of the three man crew along with Frank Gifford and Howard Cosell, would often start to sing "Turn out the lights, the party's over" when the game was pretty much in hand and one team was about to earn a victory. Well, when I began to look at what our government is doing with the "stimulus" legislation, I realized that the song needed to be dusted off to say goodbye to the quaint notion of federalism.
I am sure that most of you know exactly what federalism is, but for the unitiated here's a quick thumbnail explanation: federalism is the constitutional concept of the Founders of this Republic of ours that separated the powers of the federal and state governments. In short, there were supposed to be areas where the states reigned supreme, areas that were the province of the national government alone, and ultimately the federal government was to have as little interaction with the various state governments as possible. That's it: simple and brilliant.
But this recent "stimulus" legislation has totally blown that concept to shreds, putting the notion of federalism out of its misery. To be sure, the idea of federalism has been steadily weakened in this nation, with the federal government continually creeping into the picture and sticking its dirty fingers into the pies of the states. The federal government has stuck its nose into so many different state matters, from education to road maintainence, that most people figured the concept was already dead. But the fact is, even with the increase of federal creep into the private affairs of the states the concept was at least paid lip service by our elected leaders. But no more! The "stimulus" bill has finally disabused us of the notion that the states are willing or able to make it on their own without federal intervention.
This abomination of a bill has the effect, outside of being the jumping off point for the open practice of creating a socialistic economy, of making the various states simply clients of the government in Washington. Far too many of the states have taken budget surpluses and turned them into deficits because of poor fiscal management and profligate spending. I mean really, how else does a state manage to run up a 40 plus BILLION dollar deficit? As they so succintly stated on an episode of The Simpson's "tax and spend, tax and spend!" Now the bill for all of the spending has come due, the federal government has offered them a Faustian bargain, and the states are tripping over each other to get a spot at the trough. Hell, my esteemed governor Beverly Perdue was just saying that she would drive a truck to South Carolina to collect any money that their governor, Mark Sanford did not want! Yes, I know it was a "joke"...but that is not the kind of "joke" a sitting governor should be making. And the sad part is that the governors, the state legislators, and the national representatives for the various states, especially the Democrats, seem to be more than willing to give away state autonomy for a few billion dollars to bail them out of their self made messes. Futher, the few governors out there that would rather not become simple sattelites for the DC government are being attacked and derided for not lining up with the rest of the beggars to get their share of the governmental alms!
And that is why we can say R-I-P to our notion of federalism. We have changed from a nation that looked at government as a helper of LAST resort to a nation that demands that government fix our personal problems for us. We have become a nation that thinks the President can, or should care to, get us a better job than we have at McDonald's, or that he can provide us with a home when we can't afford one. And our states have become the latest victims of the welfare mentality that has broken so many homes in this country; they have decided that they won't do the work to provide for themselves because Big Daddy Government is there to fix all that ails us. So I just have one thing to say to the concept of federalism....
Turn out the lights, the party's over!