As I perused the newspaper today, a common hallmark of modern politics stood out to me. People often complain that Washington is constantly waffling around and not addressing the pressing issues that confront our country, and in the rare instances when someone grows a backbone we only get half solutions that don't solve the problem, if they don't make them worse. Why is this so? I personally would like to think that at least half of the politicians in Washington aren't womanizers and sociopaths, all though I might be a little too optimistic, and that they are really trying to do what they feel is best for the country.
The problem I believe is that our country as a whole has become so diverse and divided that effective compromise is unlikely. The founders foresaw this, and that is the purpose of a federal-style government, divided into state and national authorities. The original idea was that the national (Federal) government would assume control over issues that dealt with more than one state or the nation as a whole and that the state and local governments and the individuals would have control over all other issues. In our current mess, the Federal government has assumed authority over an ever-expanding list of "national" issues, usually using the excuse of the interstate commerce clause.
Due to this, states usually take a back seat to the Federal government and wait for them to solve problems. On the other hand, if states were expected to solve more of the problems, then the presumably less diverse individual states would be able to come up with more effective and comprehensive solutions to the various problems that face our country. Also, there would likely be a wide variety of solutions that each state would experiment with, and eventually each state could find a solution that met their needs, possibly from seeing what worked and didn't work in other states. That was another purpose of having separate state governmental entities. If each state could tackle problems like health care, immigration, medicaid and medicare, etc. it is likely that much more effective solutions would be reached.
