As the Founding Fathers so eloquently explained in writing after writing, and on the floors of Independence Hall and Congress, the closer government is to the people and the more directly the people can influence its decisions, the less likely it will become abusive or tyrannical. The laws it passes are more likely to be effective and satisfying to the citizens and ones they will gladly follow. President Thomas Jefferson phrased it best when he argued that local government, of all government, is the most naturally democratic, precisely because it is closest to the everyday lives of the people.
This is the basis of federalism. The political framework guaranteeing this exercise of personal liberty and responsibility and the proper checks and balances between state and federal governments already exists. The Constitution, established by the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, delineated the "few and defined" powers of the federal government. The Bill of Rights, adopted on March 4, 1789, enumerated the rights of the people and the powers residing in the states. Many observers, however, wonder whether the federal government has not indeed crossed the line, and are scrutinizing the relationship between the government in Washington, D.C., and their own local and state governments to make sure the checks and balances still apply (Brownson, 1972, pp. 4-12).
One of the leading principals of the 1994 Contract With America, for example, was to alter the terms of the national debate in Washington on the issues of federalism and devolution. Members of Congress voiced a new willingness to allow state and local governments a greater freedom to deal with a number of intransigent economic and social problems that federal programs had not solved. Several proposals were put forward advocating the transfer of select limited functions from the federal to state and local governments, a process now commonly known as "devolution." The underlying...