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You have to hand it to Donald Trump’s limitless political genius. Beyond his obvious capacity to drive the media and the left (but I repeat. . .) out of their minds, some of his singular achievements have gone unremarked. Consider, for instance, that Trump has figured out how to make Democrats actually hate a Kennedy. Republicans have ben trying without success to do this for 60 years.
It looks like Trump is also making Democrats rediscover federalism. I’m not making this up! Check out Franklin Foer in The Atlantic, describing “The Coming Democratic Revolution.”
With Trump’s unified control of the Republican Party, which now has unified control of Washington, congressional oversight is defunct.
That leaves a lone bastion of countervailing power, one force capable of meaningfully slowing the maximalist ambitions of the incoming administration: blue states, especially the 15 state governments where Democrats control the executive and legislative branches and, therefore, have more latitude to launch aggressive countermeasures.
Over the past several months, a small coterie of wonks and lawyers—and a few farsighted Democratic governors—have been working in anticipation of this moment. . . As they pondered the latent power of state government, the outlines of a new progressive vision of federalism—pugilistic and creative, audacious and idealistic—began to emerge.
In another era, this vision might have felt paltry, especially to liberals, many of whom tend to dream of centralization and train their intellectual capital on Washington. Given the dire circumstances in which Democrats now find themselves, however, there’s no true alternative. And liberals might soon discover that federalism, once the hobbyhorse of conservatives, contains not only the hope of stubborn resistance but the possibility of regeneration.
Good to see the original party of states rights going back to their old comfy home, It’s so crazy it just might work!
And as the next Trump Administration flexes the centralized executive power that Democrats have built up over the decades on behalf of conservative ends, I suspect Democrats might even rediscover the separation of powers!
And before long they might even notice this old document called The Constitution of the United States.
Nah—not even Trump could dream up that.