The Republican Central Authority

Do conservatives believe in states' rights?

Against Interpretation, by Conor Clarke, American Prospect: More than a decade ago, when Kansas Republican Jan Meyers proposed making welfare reform a state-by-state grant program -- instead of a federally-run entitlement program -- she was under the impression that she was doing her party a favor. It was March of 1993, as Ron Haskins recounts in his Work Over Welfare... “The most important characteristic of block grants,” writes Haskins, “is that they greatly increase state and local, as opposed to federal, control of social programs.” In other words, it was about states’ rights. And Republicans, as everyone knows, just eat that stuff up.

Or maybe not. On October 1, to very little fanfare, the state flexibility elements built into the original Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF) program met an ignominious demise. ... In February, ... President Bush signed into law the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which changed TANF...

Those new ... rules ... contain plenty that will and should annoy liberals. But it’s worth asking why conservatives aren’t upset about them, too. They certainly are not: In the Senate, 50 Republicans voted for the legislation that created them. In the House, 216 did. And that reflects ... continuing hypocrisy about states’ rights: Republicans are willing to let them go the moment they come into competition with other interests.

In theory, conservatives support states’ rights because they like to see political power decentralized. When the might of government is wielded at a national level, it begins to look a bit like we’re just a hop-skip away from the Soviet gulag. “Part of the birthright of Republicans is wariness about big government,” writes Haskins, on why Meyers’ proposal was so attractive. ...

And whenever the federal will trumps an obvious local preference, the states’ rights people are supposed to get upset. ... But the new welfare rules ... create a set of federal rules. And they link acceptance of those rules to federal funding: states risk losing a good deal of their block grants if they resist. Conservatives don’t seem terribly distressed about any of this. ... Indeed, welfare reform joins a long and ever-growing list of issues -- abortion, gay marriage, and just glance at the GOP platform for more -- in which federalism has been abandoned in the pursuit of a narrow virtue.

That’s a shame, because there’s evidence that, in the case of welfare, flexibility has been good for the states. ... It’s hard to know exactly what effect the new welfare rules and other DRA mandates will have -- though the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and others, have had interesting things to say. Welfare rolls will probably fall, just as they did after 1996 welfare reform. (Of course, when you mandate a 50 percent cut under threat of massive grant reductions and drastically limit the welfare options states can employ, it’s a bit hard to imagine any outcome other than states hemorrhaging beneficiaries left and right.)...

But the new rules will create one thing for sure: Bureaucracy. New federal jobs will have to be dreamed up to make sure states are complying. Paperwork will have to be filled out. Fines will have to be imposed. The free market will cry out in agony. There might have been a time when conservatives would have been bothered by this. But not anymore.