Not if we also have libertarian-minded people in the state legislatures.
I guess. That won't happen though.
Please inform me of how I'm supposed to combat tyranny in a state where I'm not registered to vote.
Lie down in the grass and take it?
There's no way to combat tyranny without voting.
On the contrary; fixing state governments is much easier because each state legislator represents fewer constituents, and therefore each voter has a stronger voice.
States are more politically homogeneous than the country as a whole, and state governments are subject to fewer regulations (a la the Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc. and no state constitution is as protective nor as comprehensive as the U.S. Constitution). It is easier to take and sustain a majority to impose your will under such political conditions. If the Southern states, for example, had been free to dissolve slavery of their own volition, it would have come much later if at all. The right for women and blacks to vote would also come later and never be guaranteed on a national level; again,
if at all.
Please explain to me how allowing Congress to impose the War on Drugs nationwide is more pro-freedom than allowing the states to have full sovereignty on the matter.
Not sure I said anything about a war on drugs, but for a guy who whines about straw men a lot you sure like to make them.
Easiest of all to resist the wrongs of no tyrants at all. If we're taking the graph to its logical conclusion.
I'd be happy to follow that digression.
For basic human rights, I'd agree with that. However, most of the stuff that government does is not basic human rights. I tend to think of the government as acting mostly like a referee; it has profound powers that can only be used in certain situations. If a player punches another guy in the face--okay, in a sport that isn't hockey--there are penalties. But the referee can't swing a game one way or the other just to make the game or the season 'better', whatever that means.
Well, human rights and civil liberties are what I'm concerned with here.
Do you believe that the powers of the 50 current US state governors are greater than that of a sing current US President? I hope not, because you would be sourly mistaken.
Of course not.
And its irrelevant. States have their own constitutions to live up to, so ensuring the federal government lives up to its own constitution as well does not yield state tyrants.
Do
you believe the state constitutions are as protective and guarantee as much in the way of rights and freedoms as the U.S. Constitution, with its very fine bill of rights and carefully enumerated powers?
I think history shows that states can and will abuse their powers within the extent that they are technically permitted to do so by the U.S. Constitution. The institution of slavery comes to the forefront of my mind in this case, when the states were so eager to keep their private fiefdoms that they revolted against their democratically elected government. And for what? Slavery? State's rights? No, it was to preserve the aristocracy, the power structures they had so carefully and elaborately built, and which they knew would fall if the federal government got half a mind about telling them all to cut out that slavery business.
addendum: I think the federal government is also prone to such abuses, but inasmuch as civil liberties are concerned the federal government is an excellent tool for enforcing necessary rights legislation on a nationwide basis.
