Posted Monday, March 30th, 2009 by HLPRonline editorial staff
Not Old or Borrowed: The Truly New Blue Federalism
by ROBERT A. SCHAPIRO
Progressives once feared federalism as a mechanism for allowing deviant, pernicious practices to persist. Federalism, it seemed, might constitute a polite, historically grounded justification for blocking the federal government from guaranteeing basic human rights to people throughout the United States. After all, “states’ rights” provided a rallying cry for opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, in 1964, a leading political scientist wrote, “[I]f in the United States one disapproves of racism, one should disapprove of federalism.”
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