America's Federalist Heritage Rediscovered

...As recent revelations have served to underscore, Brandeis was in many ways the last of the great liberal advocates of "states' rights," localism, and decentralization of government power...

...If under its new leadership the Soviet Union wants to make a good impression on the West, it may be to Poland's advantage: Poles know not to take such Soviet attempts too seriously, but such attempts may facilitate concessions...

...Maurice J. Holland AMERICA'S FEDERALIST HERITAGE REDISCOVERED All powers not explicitly granted to Washington are reserved for the states, agreed...

...With the possible exception of Judicial review, the most distinctive and, at least according to the original understanding, most important feature of the American constitutional order is the federal structure of the Union...

...He seems to know how to conduct this dialogue, and knows that it is better not to enter one conducted at gun point...

...Under-round Solidarity made popular the slogan: "There is no freedom without Solidarity...

...But it is pre-y cisely the ability to make this distinction that is one of Solidarity's achievements...

...The Tenth Amendment and a three-day meeting at Yale last spring proffered alternatives to elephantiasis on the Potomac...

...Instead, for at least a generation, American law H THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983 11...

...No recondite grasp of U.S...

...By their dispersal of power between the central government and the states, the Framers of the United States Constitution endeavored to create a nation sufficiently unified to foster commerce on a continental basis and to command respect abroad, while at the same time preserving the benefits of local self-government within relatively small geographical and jurisdictional spheres...

...Federalism being a constitutional as well as a political value, one might suppose that the powerful forces working against it would have been resisted at least to some degree by the legal profession...

...A complex and delicate balance was delineated in the work of the Philadelphia Convention, whereby the responsibilities of conducting military and diplomatic affairs, coining money, and regulating interstate commerce were assigned to the central authority, while jurisdiction over most areas of life of immediate concern to ordinary citizens, including crime, tort, property matters, domestic relations, and commercial dealings, was reserved to the states...

...D...

...There is also the camouflage against voter scrutiny which the sheer intricacy of the Washington government apparatus supplies...

...The days of New Deal, bread-and-butter liberalism are now long past, but the subsequent shift of the liberal agenda from such questions as the rights of labor, income maintenance,, and business regulation to such matters as protected status for heterodox "lifestyles," extirpation of "sexist stereotypes," and "attitude adjustment" or "consciousness raising" by means of educationist psychodramas, has, if anything, brought even greater insistence on investing Washington with ever more plenary authority at the expense of states and localities...

...The watershed was, of course, the New Deal, and Louis Brandeis Maurice J. Holland teaches law at Indiana University...

...To begin with, contemporary liberalism has largely lost its historic confidence that its programs will flourish at those levels of government closest to the popular grass roots...

...The two World Wars, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and the proliferation of federal grant programs have all contributed to degrading the role of the states to the point where they seem iw be little more than administrative subdivisions of the Washington behemoth...

...Thousands of union activists and others are still in prisons, sentenced for or accused of such political crimes as conducting union activities during martial law (these prisoners should not be confused with the internees, whose numbers are relatively small, a confusion clearly intended by the Jaruzelski regime...

...Moreover, priority-reordering is an expensive business, and only in the federal treasury can tens of billions in increased revenue be found every year without the resistance that explicitly voted tax hikes would arouse from the electorate...

...The re•:.s"ns for this preference are not far to seek...

...His views were in this respect markedly different from those of Frankfurter, his protege and successor on the Supreme Court, who, like most New Dealers, believed in "national solutions to national problems," of which they tended to see a remarkable abundance...

...After his release from internment he said: an agreement, yes, but not on my knees...

...and Felix Frankfurter can serve as representative figures in this transformation and the political realignment that accom panied it...

...It is up to the Poles to know the difference between genuine concessions and being dragged deeper into the Soviet camp...

...history is needed to recognize that American federalism has taken something of a battering in the twentieth century, and the reasons are hardly obscure...

...In Washington, far more than in state capitals, a great deal of public policy is made by officials accountable to the electorate only in the most attenuated way-the career personnel of the huge "permanent government," the agency and congressional staffs, and, of course, by no means least, the judges...