Democracy upside down
- sciart0
- Jul 22
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "Texans deserve to have the constitutionality of their Dream Act judged in court, not killed off via a collaboration between the president and the state attorney general. And even more alarming than the Trump administration’s dismantling of this law is that it’s part of a broader effort to short-circuit democracy at the state level.
State-level democracy is essential to America’s federalist system.
During another time in U.S. history when a majority of the Supreme Court was imposing barriers to the public’s ability to self-govern, Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously observed, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
Later, Justice William Brennan argued that states have the “power to impose higher standards” under state law “than is required under the Federal Constitution.” Throughout America’s long history, state-level innovations have pushed the country forward: Some states abolished slavery long before the Civil War, granted women the right to vote before the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted, and legalized marriage equality years before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.
Of course, states have not always been on the side of human freedom and progress. Appeals to “states’ rights” have served as rallying cries for enslavers, segregationists, and others seeking to deny the rights of people and communities since the nation’s founding. “No state,” the Fourteenth Amendment proclaimed after the Civil War, shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” When America’s system of government works as it should, the federal government steps in to prevent states from undermining human freedom.
That’s what America saw in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to implement a Supreme Court ruling to desegregate schools; the governor, an avowed segregationist, had refused to comply. President John F. Kennedy similarly federalized the Alabama National Guard to carry out desegregation orders at the University of Alabama, again over the objection of a pro-segregation governor."