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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times, left; Carmel Zucker
for The New York Times
REDDER,
BLUER Massachusetts allows gay marriage; South Dakota passed a
sweeping ban on abortion. |
The Not-So United
States
By PAM BELLUCK,
NYTimes on the Web, April 23, 2006
AFTER Massachusetts became the first
state to enact near-universal health care coverage this month, Robert E.
Travaglini, the State Senate president, allowed himself a bit of bravado.
"This is going to be a template for the rest of the nation to follow, and not
just this," Mr. Travaglini crowed, rattling off a list of recent Massachusetts
milestones. "We did this for same-sex marriage; we did this for stem cell
research. Massachusetts is at the head of the curve."
Ahead of the curve for some, perhaps. But for those sitting in, say, South
Dakota, which recently enacted a law that bans all abortions except those
necessary to save the life of the mother, Massachusetts might look more like it
has gone off the deep end. And vice versa.
Such are the political and ideological extremes bubbling up from the states
these days. Local legislatures are debating everything from teaching
"intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution in public schools to
financing stem cell research to preventing gay couples from adopting.
These debates raise a number of questions. Is the country destined to
balkanize into a patchwork of polar-opposite policies? How will this
diversity be reconciled? Does it need to be?
There have been other points in American history when state laws were radically
different, historians say, citing slavery, and then the Jim Crow laws in the
South. This could be another time of radical divergence.
"I think this is up there among the eras of greatest distance among the states,"
said John D. Donahue, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
"It's because we have fairly intense cleavages in values, preferences, points of
view among the population, and in some of these areas they do tend to cluster
state by state."
Consider California, where a bill introduced in the Legislature this month would
make the state the first to impose limits on the emissions of all greenhouse
gases. Also, California, along with New Jersey, Maryland and Connecticut,
has allocated money for stem cell research.
And Rhode Island passed a law this year allowing the use of medical marijuana
despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled last June that the authorities
could prosecute users of marijuana even when the state allows its use.
On the other end of the political spectrum are states like Idaho, Georgia and 17
others with constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. Or
Florida, Mississippi and Utah, which effectively ban adoption by same-sex
couples.
In some ways this landscape is a blue state-red state divide, but it goes beyond
cultural hot buttons to issues like health care and tort reform. It raises
the specter of people migrating to different states because of their policies.
Will people move to Kansas, for example, because they want schools that include
a critical approach to evolution in their curriculum? Because same-sex
marriage is currently not an option for anyone other than Massachusetts
residents or people who intend to reside there, some same-sex couples have
established Massachusetts residency so they can marry.
Certainly, the emergence of strong state stances on social issues like same-sex
marriage and abortion reflects a certain amount of political strategy and
opportunism.
Political parties "have seen the advantages of cultural wedge issues and seek to
inflame them," Professor Donahue said. "We haven't had a rip-roaring
depression for awhile and when economic issues seem less urgent, there is more
room for secondary issues to become political motivators."
The federal government's posture on certain issues also spurs action by the
states. On some issues, the federal government, under the current and
other recent administrations, has imposed far-reaching laws and regulations,
said John Kincaid, a professor of government and public service at Lafayette
College in Easton, Pa.
"There's been a tremendous amount of federal pre-emption of state law in last
couple of decades," Dr. Kincaid said. He cited federal laws governing
consumers, food labeling, class-action lawsuits and the No Child Left Behind
education law.
"So the states are responding," he said. "I think we've moved from an era
of cooperative federalism to an era of coercive federalism in which the federal
government is really dictating to the states. That has produced a really
activist response of states trying to cope with this."
On the other hand, some states appear to feel that the federal government has
not done enough on some issues. "Look what states are doing on global
warming," said Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine.
"Many of them are involved in climate change and that may well force the federal
government's hand. Stem cell research — states are doing that because the
Bush administration doesn't want to do very much."
This atmosphere has turned the concept of federalism, once a favorite of
conservatives seizing on states' rights to buck liberal national laws and court
decisions, into an equal-opportunity idea embraced just as readily by liberals —
especially with a White House and Congress dominated by Republicans.
That is what Richard Thompson Ford, a Stanford University law professor, argued
in an article posted on Slate.com last year.
"Many liberals who haven't yet moved to Canada have indulged the fantasy of a
'blue state' secessionist movement," he wrote. "But the American legal tradition
does offer liberals a practical alternative to secession or a condo in
Vancouver. It's called federalism, a k a 'state's rights.' Liberals
often have a reflexive distaste for decentralization of political power:
State and local autonomy strike them as provincial and regressive. But
much of the association of federalism with conservative politics is the result
of historical accident: There is nothing inherently conservative about
limitations on the power of Congress and the executive."
SIMILAR cycles of divergence have occurred at other times in American history,
historians and political scientists said.
"Is it any more extreme than having slavery in Virginia and laws excluding
blacks from voting in Illinois when they could in Maine?" asked Pauline Maier, a
professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Not all states march in sync. There's always been a patch-quilt of state
institutions and I think it's a fine thing. You can get so much creative
legislation. In fact, the variety of state polices has been in many ways a
strength to the states. In many ways, states showed a better way of
dealing with things and a more just society. In other states, they may
have seemed backward for a time, but at least they were isolated."
Mr. Ehrenhalt said periods of state assertiveness come "in cycles and it depends
on who's in power in Washington and who's in power in the states."
The early-20th century was another time of state activism, historians said.
Ultimately, "much of the New Deal legislation in the 1930's was modeled after
state legislation," Dr. Kincaid said. In the years before the New Deal, he
said, "a lot of states had old-age pensions that looked a lot like Social
Security and workmen's compensation."
The crystal ball, then, would indicate that some of the issues enthralling the
states will eventually get sorted out nationally in federal legislation.
Mr. Ehrenhalt said a "national standard" develops that "tends to be less
rigorous than the most extreme state, but farther along than states that haven't
done anything yet."
But don't expect that to happen overnight, or on every issue. Dr. Kincaid
predicts "a significant buildup of policy actions in the states that will get
reflected in the Congressional elections" and over time, lead to federal change.
Other issues, like abortion, reside with the federal courts, meaning actions
like South Dakota's could have no impact on the outcome.
"There are some things where state diversity works out just fine," Professor
Donahue. "When Montana doesn't have any daytime speed limits the effects
are fairly minor because Montana has a lot of wide open spaces and it doesn't
affect another state. But there are other things, like air pollution,
where what one state does makes a difference. On the smaller issues it's
O.K. to have differences. On the biggies you have spillover."
Give it a decade before the spillover gets sorted out, Professor Donahue said.
"If you look through American history there's an ebb and flow of more state
autonomy and more federal authority," he said. "Within another 10 years
we're going to see another season of centralization and I think we'll have
convergence on a lot of issues."
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