When Confronting the Coronavirus, Federalism Is Part of the Problem

[Poster's Note: I'm still learning the system here, so if the tag list is incomplete this is not an offense as much as it is an unintentional omission. I will correct this in future posts as necessary.]

When Confronting the Coronavirus, Federalism Is Part of the Problem

That some cities and states have stepped up to fill the gap left by Trump’s catastrophic failure is a matter of luck, not design.
By Richard Kreitner
Today 5:15 am

In the absence of national leadership, states and cities have stepped up to take charge of the coronavirus crisis and its unfathomable economic fallout. San Francisco early on took steps to mitigate spread among the city’s highly vulnerable homeless population. New York state has enacted a 90-day moratorium on evictions. Cities like Seattle and Columbus are issuing emergency vouchers to help people buy food. It has largely been up to mayors and governors to decide how seriously to take the threat and how strenuously to respond. Even some Republicans, like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, have won praise for their decisive actions. “This has been mostly a state and local effort,” one county health official explained to Politico. “The federal government has been sort of behind the times.” Indeed, Washington has essentially abandoned the states to their own devices.

Conservatives have cheered this as a triumph of federalism, proof that the founders’ model of splitting responsibility between the states and the central government still works. The coming weeks will reveal the shortcomings of such an approach. Far from encouraging competition and thwarting authoritarianism, the ambiguous division of powers has effectively fractured the country. In the United States, Polly Price of Emory University explained, immediate responsibility for handling the pandemic rests not with the federal government but with “2,684 state, local, and tribal public-health departments.” The Centers for Disease Control only offers nonbinding guidance for these smaller agencies. Though states and cities can take important steps to limit contagion, this patchwork of competing jurisdictions and overlapping authorities is too creaky and cumbersome for this crisis.
Conservative celebrations of federalism have also served to obscure the fact that their authors’ own preference for candidates who seek to weaken the national government has undoubtedly had a hand in enfeebling the federal response and making the actions of states and cities necessary. Some say that if the federal government is ineffective, it’s good to have power in the hands of the states—but the federal government is ineffective precisely because the ideology pushed by the right for at least 50 years has made it that way. During one of his terrifying news conferences last week, President Trump expressed his reluctance to invoke the Defense Production Act to force companies to manufacture ventilators, personal protective equipment, and other necessities. Trump said he didn’t want to use it because “governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work.” Such reliance on state action is about to get us into big trouble.

It is hard to imagine anything ever going fully back to normal, and that includes our current fluid division of powers between the federal and state governments. In the near term, states and cities have to continue to step up to fight both the virus and the economic disruption that has already begun. But when the emergency is over, it will be necessary to take a hard look at the naive assumptions that prevented this country from mounting a timely and effective response. A political system that can be brought to its knees by a virus emanating from an obscure city in the Chinese hinterland—and with two months’ notice to prepare—is perhaps not a system worth preserving.

At the very least, we should be raising difficult, long-postponed questions about how well the present constitutional system is fitted to the exigencies of contemporary life. Our inexcusably delayed response to the virus is not simply a failure of the Trump administration. The encounter with Covid-19 is a perfect case study in America’s deep-seated dysfunction. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson described the pandemic’s effects in the United States thus far as “a kind of grotesque caricature of American federalism.” We continue to worship the founders as far-seeing, even divinely inspired, political philosophers and constitutional craftsmen. But because the document they bequeathed to posterity nearly two and a half centuries ago is never clear, on almost any subject, about which powers and responsibilities belong to the states and which to the federal government, American politics ever since has been one extended debate—occasionally tipping over into violent struggle—over just what they actually meant.

[Rest at link.]

 https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/federalism-coronavirus-problem-government/