Dan Drezner tweeted this afternoon that Barack Obama vs Rick Perry would be the starkest choice between rival philosophies and policies since Johnson-Goldwater in 1964. That might well be true, particulalry if you limit the question to domestic policy. Perry is barely out of the traps, of course, and already people are rushing to argue he’s a dangerous lunatic. Matt Yglesias, for instance, reads Perry’s book Fed Up and picks out ten of its “weirdest ideas”. Among them, apparently:
5. Almost Everything Is Unconstitutional: Regrets the existence of jurisprudence construing the Commerce Clause to permit “federal laws regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid, creating national minimum wage laws, [and] establishing national labor laws.” Perry makes a partial exception for laws barring racial discrimination which he says fulfill “the intent behind the passage of the Reconstruction Era amendments.” (page 51)
Countering Matt (with whom Kevin Drum agrees), Avik Roy observes that this is actually a pretty mainstream view. Or, if not quite mainstream then certainly widely-held. Hell, I thought most people agreed that the Commerce Clause has been grievously abused for decades even while accepting that, sometimes, this might have produced useful outcomes. But the fact that the courts have taken an expansive view of the Commerce Clause is not, surely, a controversial view?
Consider Gonzales vs Raich, a 2005 medical marijuana case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the right, regardless of what an individual state might say, to regulate personal production and use of marijuana and that this regulation could be justified by the Commerce Clause even if the homegrown cultivation of marijuana for medicinal purposes was neither commercial nor, obviously, something that crossed state borders. Not that this was the first such interpretation of the Commerce Clause: a 1942 case ruled that the production of wheat for personal consumption was also subject to federal regulation.
Is it really madness to suggest these matters make a mockery of the notion of a federal government of limited, enumerated powers? Granted, subjects such as Medicare and Medicaid may be of greater import but objecting to the increased centralisation of American government is not, surely, a far-out, radical position?
The question for Perry, as Conor Friedersdorf amply demonstrates, is whether his Federalism – unusual even amongst conservatives and at least partly, I think, based on small-n Texas nationalism – can survive the horrors of a national campaign. It’s early days yet but already the evidence – most notably in relation to gay marriage – is that it cannot. Perry, a champion of federalism in this matter as recently as six weeks ago, is changing his tune. Perhaps this is to be expected but it’s depressing nonetheless.
If Perry were as principled a federalist as he claims to be he’d be a more attractive, if less electable, candidate than he will be once the demands of the primary campaign take their toll. That’s one problem with running a national campaign: neither voters, nor most of the media, are very impressed or likely to take seriously a candidate who says, however honestly, that many issues, both social and economic, are none of his business. It means accepting outcomes you think undesirable and, perhaps, risks elevating means above ends in ways that cannot survive a national campaign.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be this way but it is and federalism is, consequently, a lovely and lost cause. Rick Perry seems to be learning that lesson pretty quickly.
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