Obamacare, federalism in a Supreme Court tug of war
By Erin Ryan
Published: Wednesday, June 27, 2012, 4:00 AM Updated: Wednesday, June 27, 2012, 10:10 AM
"We Americans invented federalism to help us actualize a set of good-governance goals in operation of the new union. We created checks and balances between local and national power to protect individuals against governmental overreaching or abdication on either side. Federalism fosters local autonomy and interjurisdictional competition, and we hope it will promote governmental accountability to enhance democratic participation throughout the jurisdictional spectrum. Federalism also facilitates the problem-solving synergies that arise between the separate strengths of local and national governance for dealing with different parts of interjurisdictional problems. On balance, if governance advances these values, then it is consistent with the Constitution's federalism directives. If it detracts from them, then we have a problem.
The trick, of course, is that while all of these values are independently good things, they are nevertheless suspended in tension with one another, such that you can't always satisfy all of them at the same time. Sometimes local autonomy pulls in the opposite direction from checks and balances, which can alternatively frustrate problem-solving synergy. These tensions expose the values "tug of war" within federalism, highlighting the inevitable tradeoffs in interjurisdictional governance that makes it so difficult. Moreover, they suggest that the most robust approach for resolving federalism controversies should be tethered to consideration of how challenged governance fails or succeeds in advancing these fundamental values."
The trick, of course, is that while all of these values are independently good things, they are nevertheless suspended in tension with one another, such that you can't always satisfy all of them at the same time. Sometimes local autonomy pulls in the opposite direction from checks and balances, which can alternatively frustrate problem-solving synergy. These tensions expose the values "tug of war" within federalism, highlighting the inevitable tradeoffs in interjurisdictional governance that makes it so difficult. Moreover, they suggest that the most robust approach for resolving federalism controversies should be tethered to consideration of how challenged governance fails or succeeds in advancing these fundamental values."
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