The Coronavirus Response Shows That Federalism Is Working
Author: Michael Brendan Dougherty
Dougherty, Michael Brendan. “The Coronavirus Response Shows That Federalism Is Working.” National Review, National Review, 16 Mar. 2020, www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-response-shows-federalism-working/.
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State leadership and decentralization work better in a crisis than nationwide measures decreed by a dictator-like authority.
They all share the same power to help during a crisis, but a dictator has control over crisis.
The reason why is because every state is hit different and people are in quarantine and they are allowed to handle their state how they want to amongst the people.
On Saturday afternoon, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, put the 47 million people living in his country under a partial “lockdown,” closing retailers, shops, restaurants, and gymnasiums. That very evening France’s prime minister, Emmanuel Macron, announced the imminent shutdown of restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and nightclubs. It followed barely a week after Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister, announced a series of escalating closures in affected regions of Italy and the whole country. As I write, Angela Merkel is announcing “never seen before” measures including closing shops (while allowing certain categories of shops to be open on Sundays) and banning all gatherings including religious ones. And so people are asking questions such as, “Why didn’t the U.S. federal government shut down restaurants and bars the way France and Spain did?” Or they are kvetching about the president. Writer Molly Jong-Fast complains, “So the states are basically governing themselves because our president doesn’t know how to president at all?”
Was the closing of many places actually the president or the governments doing?
I agree the quarantine is a good way to limit the spread of the virus
Well, no. It’s simple: Our president doesn’t have dictatorial powers, even in a national emergency. The president doesn’t have authority to shut down your local gin joint. Your state governor does have this power, in extraordinary circumstances. That so many governors have done so, often responding to popular demand for shutdowns, demonstrates America’s genuine practice of federalism — a system that is allowing us to respond to this crisis even faster than the states of Europe that have a more monarchical or centralized system of authority for a crisis.
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One of the reasons federalism can act faster is that it allows decentralization. It is less politically risky to impose measures in one state than on an entire nation. You can respond where the hotspots are, rather than imposing costs evenly across an undifferentiated mass of the nation where the overall average risk may be low.
Even if federalism acts faster and it might solve some of the problems hotspots. It still doesn’t protect everyone, there are still risks that are in place. Those risks should be felt with before continuing as a whole state and nation. The safety of the people should come fist not the economy. Because by only controlling certain areas you forget that other areas could become a hotspot.
With regard to school shutdowns and other official social-distancing measures, little would be different today underneath a Democratic administration or a different Republican president. What is the difference between President Trump’s bloviating, and Governor Mike DeWine’s imposing restrictions in Ohio, and a hypothetical President Clinton’s having an advisory conference call with governors? Under a Democratic administration, we’d still have local school districts assessing their local circumstances and fretting over their decisions, as they should.
how does a different government change the actions of schools being closed?
And in fact, given our character as a nation, it is better that it is this way. When President Trump first imposed the travel restrictions on China — you know, the ones that he can’t stop bragging about — the initial partisan kick-reflex among Democrats and in certain sections of the media led people to immediately criticize the measure as xenophobic and ineffective. If Trump had then set about closing New York’s restaurants, many of the same critics would be asking: What happened to the authority of mayors and governors? And when did the United States become a dictatorship?
If nothing is being done yet, why is it a problem for the president to take control?
These measures are extraordinary, and they are meant for extraordinary times. But because they have been enacted in a bottom-up way, in response to demand from citizens, they have a legitimacy they’d lack if the executive branch, by fiat, had tried to convert, overnight, into an East Asian or European-style authoritarian body.
It’s also reassuring that popular demand, and individual governors motivated by it, can, when the time comes, reverse these costly shutdowns and other impositions on our social and economic life.
The actions being made are proving to people that they are able to take on any hardship, even when its facing real bad times.
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