Glenn Reynolds, in discussing why state governments are not competent to adopt Kyoto-like environmental rules in the absence of federal adoption of Kyoto, puts his finger on a fundamental truth:
Fixing potlholes and funding education should be the responsibility of state and local governments. Foreign policy should be the responsibility of the feds. Neither is doing so superbly in its assigned sphere that it can afford to spend time poaching on the other’s turf, however politically appealing such efforts might be.
No shit.
I laugh every time some little podunk municipality somewhere declares itself a nuclear-free zone, or passes a law forbidding local police to cooperate with the Feds in anti-terror investigations, or makes some other utterly meaningless gesture that isn’t even worth the time and trouble to go to court and argue the Constitutional precedents over.
Local politicians need to concentrate on their own baliwicks. My guess is that for every stupid ordinance like this, there’s an incompetent or corrupt town council that is trying desparately to deflect scrutiny of its own operations. Their solution is to make some big national splash and defy the federal government, making them “heroes” for a day.
At the same time, the Feds need to get their nose out of state and local business and do what the Constitution allows them to do. The 10th Amendment has been ignored far too long, and our huge federal government is the result. The federal government simply isn’t competent to micro-manage at the local level, and the screwed-up mess that is welfare, education, and Medicare ought to make that obvious.