Sarah Palin and the New Federalism

*
The Tenth Amendment clearly states:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

That last amendment of the Bill of Rights is at the center of an issue that resonates with the Tea Party movement, which believes that the states must take back their constitutional rights. As the federal government grows ever larger, it unconstitutionally takes power away from the states that is rightfully theirs:

A number of states have passed resolutions that assert their rights. While the resolutions have no legal teeth, they're intended to carry a message: States' rights are being trampled on.

[...]

37 state legislatures that introduced sovereignty measures in 2009. According to the Tenth Amendment Center, seven state legislatures -- Alaska, Idaho, Louisiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Tennessee -- have passed such legislation.

All the resolutions, Schwinn noted, are nonbinding and do not carry any legal muscle.

Tennessee and Alaska, in particular, went a step further: The governors in each state, including Sarah Palin of Alaska, signed their respective legislatures' resolutions.

The one-time Republican vice presidential candidate has been a vocal critic of President Obama's economic stimulus plan and tried to reject parts of the money allocated for her state that she deemed unnecessary.

Already in 2010, sovereignty resolutions have been introduced in 17 states. One of the first to move the ball forward this year is Alabama; the legislature voted in late January to approve a state sovereignty resolution.

The Hill's Bernie Quigley observed:

The Reagan period began to open up America to see and experience itself internally, and Goldwater was avatar to that internal development — Emersonian self-reliance — as well. Palin aligns Reagan with the new federalism that the Tea Party movement represents, correctly, as it was Reagan who first returned the idea of states’ rights and state sovereignty to the national political dialogue. She brings these old Jeffersonian features to mainstream conservatism.

In recent years, conservatives have paid little attention to what was one of Reagan's "first principles" -- the New Federalism. In Mitt Romney's widely acclaimed address to CPAC last year, he used the all-too familiar metaphor of a "three-legged stool" to highlight what he and many conservatives consider the most important elements of the conservative philosophy -- national security, fiscal restraint and traditional values. In the blissful afterglow of Gov. Romney's speech, hardly any of the CPAC attendees noticed that there was a leg missing from the stool -- smaller government.

Now Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, with their emphasis on limiting the federal leviathan and their focus on the Tenth Amendment, have restored New Federalism to its rightful place at the core of conservative thought. Somewhere in heaven, Ronald Reagan must be smiling.

- JP