Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 24, 1994 TAG: 9411280011
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A31 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
With the new Republican Congress, the governors hope to reshape the constitutional landscape to restore the Founders' concept of a federation of self-governing states in which the national government sticks to that fairly limited role prescribed for it by the Constitution.
A decisive breaking with the political past occurs but rarely in American history, which is good. The first, of course, is represented by the Constitution itself, and the Bill of Rights that closely followed, which was intended to apply only to the national government. Seventy years later, the Civil War extended the Bill of Rights to the states and established the primacy of the national government. Skip forward another 70 years and we see Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal using the trauma of the Great Depression and global war to begin a process that reduced the states to the caboose on the federal train.
The first two Republican presidents after Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, accepted the basic premise on which the New Deal was built. Ronald Reagan did not. But Reagan talked a better game than he played, and only by constricting the growth of federal revenues did he limit the scope of new federal initiatives. George Bush proved himself to be what his right-wing critics had so long maintained, a Republican president in the Eisenhower-Nixon tradition.
You can make the argument, of course, that all those Republican presidents had to face the political reality represented by a predominantly Democratic Congress. Only Eisenhower presided over a GOP majority in both houses, and that for his first two years only.
But beneath the surface of the old Rooseveltian hegemony, represented by almost unbroken Democratic control of Congress, a trend emerged that finally burst the barriers Nov. 8. You could see it trying to work its will in presidential elections. Beginning in 1968, Democratic candidates struggled to rise much above 43 percent of the vote while Republicans enjoyed conspicuous landslides.
Even as voters regularly returned congressional incumbents of both parties, the grass roots were restive, as evidenced by popular movements to limit the terms of elected officials and impose a balanced-budget amendment on the federal government. That restiveness is now broadened to include growing hostility to illegal immigrants and their implied threat to English as the nation's official language.
When American liberalism was seen as the champion of the "deserving" poor, it was popular. When it was seen as the champion of illegal immigrants, homosexuals, the homeless, special benefits for minorities and a host of intrusive mandates, it became unpopular; indeed, almost an epithet.
To get back to Allen's hope of a new American revolution, we might pose the question, "Why did liberalism win the field and hold it so long against all comers?" For one thing, it was right about several important matters, such as civil rights. But more important, perhaps, was that liberals institutionalized their power by granting big favors to senior citizens, labor unions, college students, farmers and government workers. By holding power so long, they ultimately co-opted big business, medicine, homebuilders, road contractors, the states, localities, etc. In other words, a carrot or a stick for everybody, and often both at the same time.
In this crucible of discontent, various proposed amendments to the Constitution are floating: term limits, school prayer, balanced budget, etc. And if the federal courts, as expected, knock down California's Proposition 187 denying certain government services to illegal immigrants, we may see an amendment addressing that. Allen has added a new one, which he hopes to place on the agenda of the Republican Governors' Conference, that would allow three-fourths of the states acting together to repeal federal laws they don't like. It's hard to see how that would work.
But amending the Constitution is properly tough, requiring the affirmative vote of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and concurrence by three-fourths of the states. There is the alternative of a convention called by identical resolutions passed by two-thirds of the states, but this has never been successfully implemented. It came close in the recent struggle to force adoption of a balanced-budget amendment, but fell just shy of the mark.
It is by no means unlikely the new Congress will finally transmit to the states a balanced-budget amendment. We may very well see them vote it down, fearing the states will be chosen to bear the brunt of the cuts to come.
Logically, the federal government would live more or less within the means generated by its existing taxes -even cutting them judiciously - allowing the states to take responsibility in such spheres as welfare and education. But many citizens will greet this prospect with fear and loathing, not excepting those Republican governors who may have to ask for tax increases to do the jobs being thrust upon them. But this is an historic opportunity and it should be seized.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB