The discussion dug deep into the complexities, contradictions, and cross-pressures of American federalism, and how states and the federal government push and pull each other on citizenship, immigration, and health care. While noting all the ways that states have infringed on Americans’ rights, panelists also said that advancing ideas and rights at the state level is vital to progress in this country, no matter which parties win elections, and no matter who is in the White House.

“You cannot ignore the states,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, founding director of the Center for Social Innovation, which is based at UC Riverside. “For people who think that somehow you can [make progress] just by taking over Congress and the presidency and even the courts, history shows otherwise … You have to build power and policy innovation in the states.”

The event’s moderator, The Nation contributing writer Richard Kreitner, started the conversation by asking whether an emphasis on states’ rights ends up leaving vulnerable people “behind enemy lines.”

Ramakrishnan said that any progressive concept of states’ rights must start with aggressive federal enforcement of the 14th Amendment, and its promise of equal protection of the laws. States can build new rights, and new dimensions of rights, on this “federal floor,” he said.

And when the powerful federal government is violating rights, it’s even more important for states to practice what he termed “progressive state citizenship” to check federal power and protect rights.

“If you don’t have federalism and you do have a lot of division along geographic lines,” said Ramakrishnan, co-author (with Allan Colbern) of the new book Citizenship Reimagined: A New Framework for State Rights in the United States, “you’re going to endow the presidency with so much power that it’s like a whipsaw action when each party takes over the presidency. That is really harmful to divided societies.”

Cornell University government professor Jamila Michener, a leading scholar of poverty and author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics, cautioned that people’s views of states’ rights can vary based on whether their preferred party is in power in Washington, D.C. Using Medicaid as an example, she explained how American federalism produces inequality, with people receiving different healthcare and having different rights as residents depending on the state in which they live.

“What happens to any of us in any place is relevant to what happens to all of us,” said Michener, who is co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity. “One of the moral challenges of the inequality that federalism breeds is precisely that: It feels like our human dignity is contingent on arbitrary geographic location.”

At the same time, she said, American federalism also “creates conditions of possibility” to make advances in states and in the nation as a whole. This means that people need to be working constantly in the states to organize and build power.

“If you’re interested in minimizing harm and minimizing suffering, and if you’re interested in and committed to a particular vision of people living with full dignity and having access to a certain set of rights, then even when the folks that you favor are in power, you don’t necessarily then sit on your laurels,” she said. “You keep building power, so you can set the terrain that pushes up that floor that is established on the federal level.”

Cynthia Buiza, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, said that California is a model of such power-building. Over the past 25 years, California has enacted a “constellation” of more than 100 policies that protect immigrants and make it easier for them to work, drive, and go to college. “The state,” she said, “recognizes the fundamental role that immigrants play.”

“California is a very interesting case study in federalism,” Buiza added. “It has managed, over the years, to decrease the pain and suffering of many vulnerable people.” But this past generation of progress is a departure from California’s previous history of limiting the rights of migrants and others. And, even with today’s protections for unauthorized immigrants, the situation of immigrant families is dire in the state due to oppressive federal policies, the pandemic, and a scarcity of housing.

“At a time when health care is so crucial for everybody, people are hesitating to go to the hospitals,” she said.

In response to questions submitted by audience members, panelists suggested that states have a role to play in combating climate change. Ramakrishnan said that states should recognize “the right to human capital” and address climate change as a threat to that right. Michener argued that climate change was both a rights and justice issue, since its impacts fall disproportionately on poor people and communities of color.

Buiza and Ramakrishnan were also emphatic that the possible election of Joe Biden shouldn’t slow down state-level efforts to defend immigrants and pursue other expansions of rights. Ramakrishnan pointedly noted that the Obama administration had opposed sanctuary policies in California. Both he and Michener sought to debunk one conventional argument—that the pursuit of progressive policies in California or other states would provoke oppressive policies in other states. Progressive immigration policies in states have generally been protected by courts, while more regressive ones have been thrown out, Ramakrishnan said.

Kreitner, the moderator and author of the book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Perfect Union, asked whether the different policies of states helped hold the country together or are evidence that the country is splitting up.

Michener said that the divisions between states were being politicized, racialized, and institutionalized in destructive and increasingly visible ways. Americans, she said, must contend with these divisions. “Do I think it’s going to end well, with us remaining a singular polity that learns our lessons and then moves forward in a unified way?” Michener said. “No, not especially. But I’d be happy to be wrong.”

Buiza, herself an immigrant from the Philippines, noted that she had been to countries with separatist movements, including Indonesia, and that divisions should be taken seriously. But she believes that the United States is still very capable of solving national problems together, including the reform of its immigration system.

“I don’t know that there has been a final referendum on the American Dream,” Buiza said, “and if there is, I would like to know what it is—because right now, I still believe it.”

The post Why States Can Lead America Forward appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then you might be a true patriot in the greatest American tradition.

Or do you cling to the hope of national unity? Do you believe that we must compromise to preserve our sprawling union of 330 million?

Then you might be part of the problem.

The frightening 2020 election is already disrupting how we think about America and California’s place in it—and thank goodness for that. Perhaps now, Americans might come to see national unity as a dangerous and destructive pursuit, and to recognize that embracing our divisions may provide the best hope for protecting our rights and building a better future.

This powerful argument fuels two smart new books. One is a revisionist American history, Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union by The Nation contributing writer Richard Kreitner. The other is a deep, California-inspired analysis of the present and future, Citizenship Reimagined: A New Framework for States’ Rights in the United States, by Arizona State University political scientist Allan Colbern and UC Riverside Center for Social Innovation director S. Karthick Ramakrishnan.

The two books share a crucial insight: that the federal government has never been a reliable protector of Americans and their rights. So progress and protection often result not from unity, but from different parts of the country going their own way. From fighting slavery to advancing women’s suffrage, from same-sex marriage to marijuana legalization, states have often led the way in extending our rights, often in the face of fierce federal opposition.

When Americans unify and govern themselves through national compromise, on the other hand, we have done awful things together—adopting a Constitution that enshrined slavery and shunned democracy, ending Reconstruction and launching Jim Crow, incarcerating minorities, granting ever-greater powers to presidents, and pursuing endless wars.

The good news is that we Americans—“an Obstinate and Ungovernable People, Utterly Unacquainted with the Nature of Subordination,” in the words of a British officer quoted by Kreitner—aren’t often cursed with national unity. Division, disunion, and cold civil war are our natural states, as befits a country that venerates its founding divorce filing, the Declaration of Independence.

“Secession is the only kind of revolution we Americans have ever known and the only kind we’re ever likely to see,” Kreitner writes.

Kreitner shows how breaking up the country—an idea typically associated only with the Civil War—has been sought by every region, across every American era, and even considered by major figures like Jefferson and Madison. He offers wonderful tidbits, from President Zachary Taylor’s 1849 opinion that California would be better off as an independent entity to the American diplomat George F. Kennan’s 1993 argument that the U.S. had become “a monster country” that should be divided into a dozen different republics. Our devotion to disunion is so great that, if you haven’t thought of splitting up the country, you probably don’t belong here.

“Paradoxically,” Kreitner writes, “disunion has been one of our only truly national ideas.”

From the Civil War to the civil rights movement, division and conflict have inspired Americans to make big changes. “Disunion startles a man to thought,” said the 19th-century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who argued that the North should leave a Union fatally compromised by slavery. “[Disunion] takes a lazy abolitionist by the throat, and thunders in his ear, ‘Thou are the slaveholder!’”

How to use division in pursuit of a better America is the focus of Colbern and Ramakrishnan’s book, Citizenship Reimagined. These two scholars argue that, to counter toxic federal regimes and expand the rights and powers of regular people, states should exercise powers that we typically think of as federal.

They call this approach “progressive state citizenship” and say that the California of the past decade is a model. In particular, they point to a series of bills signed by Gov. Jerry Brown that expanded immigrant rights. These laws granted undocumented Californians the rights to work, drive, and access public services, while also defending law-abiding immigrants from federal overreach.

In this way, California is a turnaround story—in previous decades, the state practiced “regressive state citizenship,” eroding rights for immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. For that reason, they caution that the nation needs robust enforcement of the 14th Amendment to ensure a “federal floor” of rights through which states can’t fall.

“Progressive state governments can provide rights and protections to citizens and noncitizens that exceed the federal floor, temporarily anchoring the country to progressive values and ideals during times of restrictive national regimes,” Colbern and Ramakrishnan write.

The pandemic, with the federal government’s failure forcing states to take on health and safety duties, may accelerate the trend of state leadership going forward, the authors suggest.

Since division is so powerful and productive in the United States, it’s quite possible that whatever conflict follows our current election may be far more consequential than the vote tallies themselves. After all, both campaigns prize unity, albeit in very different ways. President Trump explicitly urges authoritarian, anti-democratic, and violent measures to unify America by force, no matter the costs. And Joe Biden’s emphasis on bipartisan unity, and his desire to avoid bolder policies that might divide his broad coalition, explain why his candidacy feels hollow, even to many Americans who support him.

What the country needs is not another compromise that preserves false unity, but an honest reckoning with the costs and benefits of keeping the national marriage together. This means that everything—from a new constitution to the honorable and traditional American idea of independence and secession—should go on the table. Breaking up the country might even prove the least divisive way to make American life more just.

“If the day should ever come … when the affections of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred,” John Quincy Adams said in 1839, as quoted by Kreitner, “far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.”

The post Should We Embrace Our Divisions to Build a Better America? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The scenario may be fictional, but the idea of California independence, once dismissed as a joke, is gaining both cultural currency and real-world urgency. Our own real-life governor, Gavin Newsom, frequently describes California as a “nation-state,” to make the point that the Golden State must act like an independent country to protect itself during the biggest pandemic in a century. In the absence of reliable federal assistance, California’s local and state officials, along with businesses, have scrambled to provide the protective equipment, testing, ventilators, and guidance that were once thought to be the responsibility of federal agencies.

While conventional wisdom remains that California would never leave the union, who can put faith in conventional wisdom anymore? Polling has showed for three years that one-third of Californians support their state’s peaceful withdrawal from the nation. And Californians’ anger at the federal government is high, with relentless and nasty fights between the state and the White House over California’s attempts to protect its immigrants, women, health care, water, housing, environment, and elections.

Those fights can be partisan, but the differences between California and the U.S. run deeper than mere party lines. And they aren’t temporary. Even the election of a Democratic president is unlikely to bring state and nation together. The cause of the rift between Californians and America goes well beyond the political to the structural, the cultural, and the constitutional.

California is a future-oriented modern democracy with a powerful initiative process that allows its highly diverse population (60-plus percent identifying as non-white) to make laws and amend its constitution directly. The U.S., on the other hand, is a majority-white country that clings to a 1789 constitution that famously permitted slavery, is nearly impossible to amend, and prohibits election of the president by popular vote.

While California’s system encourages a constant give-and-take between citizens and leaders, the power of the U.S. presidency is vast and largely unaccountable; one person in the Oval Office could start an apocalyptic nuclear war without permission from voters or other branches of government.

Those other branches are also sheltered from democratic interventions. Too much power lies with a U.S. Senate that makes a mockery of equal representation, with California’s 40 million people receiving the same two senators as Vermont’s 625,000. And the most difficult decisions in America are made by an unaccountable Supreme Court of highly politicized, life-tenured judges.

None of this makes California’s departure from the union likely. But it does guarantee that our state will be in constant conflict with the U.S.—and that there will be repeated attempts by California to escape the union, for at least as long as the current American Constitution remains in place.

So what is the best way to pursue and manage California’s efforts at independence in the years ahead?

The essential answer to that question is: peacefully. And to make independence peaceful, Californians must hew to the principle that any Calexit must win the support of majorities in both California and the United States as a whole.

Reaching such a double consensus means that any healthy process of considering independence must be about more than the narrow questions about how California would create its own country. Instead, an independence process must start by reconsidering the systems and the future of the entire United States. In essence, if California ever decides to leave the United States and form a new country, it must try to transform the United States into a new country first.

Right now is an auspicious time for just such a reconsideration. With protestors toppling statues of the Founders and institutions pledging to end systemic racism in the U.S., the place to start is by reconsidering America’s original system—the Constitution.

This suggestion will make some Americans crazy, because people in this country have come to deify their Constitution. Americans also assume—after hearing such rhetoric for all our lives—that the end of our current Constitution would mean the end of freedom and democracy.

But that’s not true: Ending one republic does not mean the end of a nation. It means starting a new republic. The French are on their fifth republic. Switzerland, a multicultural and multilingual state that has remained stable and peaceful for 500 years, routinely remakes its constitution, most recently in 1999.

California, the nation’s most creative and populous state, is the perfect place to remake the American republic.

A California-led constitutional rewrite would fit our history. While other states went through a process of becoming a territory and then negotiating statehood with Washington, California hurriedly convened an unauthorized convention in 1849 and declared itself a state, leaving the U.S. no choice but to ratify the self-admission in 1850.

In that spirit, California should convene scholars and representatives from as many states as possible to draft a new American Constitution. Such a body would look at constitutions all over the world with the goal of creating the most advanced 21st-century governing system possible.

A new constitution offers the opportunity to re-found the United States with present-day values of equality and justice. Instead of a constitution that started in slavery and persists in discrimination, we could have a constitution that barred discrimination of any kind. Women could finally be made officially, and constitutionally, equal.

A new constitution also could provide for truly national elections, and could include modern devices like national referenda for major decisions (like going to war) and proportional representation to end our polarizing, winner-take-all political culture. The two-house Congress, a breeding ground for corruption, could be replaced with a single parliament. The power of the American executive could be limited, and distributed to more than one person, to prevent one deranged president from blowing up the world. A new constitution could commit the country to environmental protection and make the passing of international treaties easier, to allow America to fight full-force against climate change.

Once that new constitution is drafted—and the draft is translated into all of the world’s languages, so anyone can read it—California voters would decide whether to approve it. If they turn it down, the convention would have to keep revising it until it gets something that meets voter approval.

Once approved in California, the proposed constitution would be sent to the other 49 states, asking them to adopt it. This is an idea grounded in our current national constitution’s Article V, which permits the calling of a convention to amend or even redo the Constitution by the approval of 34 states. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 85, wrote that Article V was included because we might need to change the Founders’ system; they couldn’t have confidence it would always be the best one.

The other states could accept our constitutional proposal. Or they could amend it, in consultation with California. In either event, California would have helped give the United States a 21st-century governing document that, presumably, would be more democratic, and more supportive of equal rights and environmental protection. Free of the old Constitution, the United States could stop endlessly measuring today’s policies against centuries-old legal precedents, and would have more time to plan for the future.

In that scenario, the Golden State would stay in a more perfect union. But it’s also possible that other states would reject the document, and even the entire exercise. That would leave California with the choice of whether to stay and suffer within the U.S., or to negotiate a peaceful exit from the union.

The nation of California would face some of the same challenges the state of California has struggled to manage—water, education, infrastructure, and taxation. But it also would give the world an alternative American nation with governing rules that aren’t compromised by the sins of the 18th century. Perhaps we could finally conquer our rampant gun violence. Or perhaps California could limit its military and adopt a policy of neutrality, thus demonstrating that Americans actually can organize a nation that doesn’t pursue constant warfare.

The good news: If California sought independence, it wouldn’t have to draft a new constitution. It could simply use the constitution it drafted for the U.S. as the governing document of the new Golden Nation.

In this scenario, California could walk away in good conscience, having done everything it could to save America from itself.

The post Could <i>The Politician</i>‘s #Calexit Fantasy Bring Real Change?  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From: Joe Mathews

Re: Summit

If North and South Korea can have a peace summit, why can’t California and Texas do the same?

The United States desperately needs its two biggest states to figure out how to keep the country together.

Our nation’s political leaders are committed to dividing the country; their business model for elections and fundraising depends on ever-greater polarization of the American electorate. And so the American government’s mission now amounts to three things: mismanaging entitlement programs, handing our tax breaks to donors, and throwing trillions of dollars at endless wars that should instead go to our infrastructure.

So if this country is ever going to put itself back together, it’ll be up to your two states. You’re the two most successful examples of American states—capable of attracting millions of Americans and their dreams. Sure, you represent different constituencies and versions of the American idea. Texas represents the cheap, lightly regulated, freedom- and gun-loving counterpoint to California’s progressive cultural and technological powerhouse.

But you have one big thing in common: the American predicament. You are both nation-sized places stuck inside an even larger country. California, with nearly 40 million people, has the world’s fifth-largest economy; while Texas, approaching 30 million people, has the 10th-largest economy in the world. If you were presidents and your states were countries, they would be the 38th and 49th most populous nations on earth, respectively.

All of which gives California and Texas a common enemy: federal power.

For more than a century, whichever party is in power in Washington has seized more authority for the federal government. Recent presidents of all stripes—from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump—have ruled increasingly by executive order and other dictates.

Quite often, this increasingly dictatorial federal power has been aimed at the two of you.

By now, the drill is familiar. A Democratic administration will seek to impose policies that run contrary to Texas’s preferences on health care, the environment, criminal justice, or labor. And so Texas, often with some of its Southern state friends, fights and sues. That’s why, when you were state attorney general, Governor Abbott, you famously described your job as: “I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.”

Now that Republicans are in power, it’s California’s turn to be targeted for its progressive policies on climate, pollution, immigration, and health care. So now the state gets together with its Western (and Northeastern) friends and resists with lawsuits, more than two dozen against the Trump administration. This endless cycle of litigation appears to be escalating so fast that The New York Times called it a legal civil war.

All this fighting isn’t good for the country, or your states. It takes time and resources away from your states’ efforts to improve the lives of your citizens. And the resentments create internal divisions. Both of your states have movements seeking secession from the United States. And the fights with the federal government often inspire legal battles between your states and their cities.

The good news is: You don’t have to live like this! Together, the two of you can break the cycle.

That’s why you need a peace summit. The goals of the talks should be twofold. First, for both states to reaffirm their American-ness and commit to peaceful coexistence.

Second, for both states to work together to reduce federal power, and enhance the independence of states and their local communities.

This must go beyond reaffirming the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reserves for the states the powers not given to the federal government. California and Texas are now so big that they need more explicit autonomy, so that they can make more of their own decisions without interference.

The D.C. Mandarins will call this a revolution. So be it. California and Texas must declare that this is not the United States of 13 states and 3 million people that adopted the constitution in 1789. Our country of more than 320 million is simply too big to be governed centrally from Washington, much less by the sort of people—first-term U.S. senators and reality TV stars—who get elected president these days. Our states deserve to be left alone to pursue their own destinies, with the federal government existing for little more than social insurance and national defense.

Indeed, the best argument for greater state autonomy is a democratic one. Our country barely passes as a democracy at the federal level, with a presidency often won by the candidate who lost the popular vote, a U.S. Senate that makes a mockery of equal representation, and powerful bureaucracies that defy accountability.

You’ll have to figure out through negotiations what your joint agenda is. But conservative Texas will want to transfer more taxing and regulatory power back to the state and local level, while California will want more regulatory and financing power at the state level to pursue major progressive advances in climate change, health care, and immigration protection.

I realize this will be hard politically: You both will lose the political crutch of blasting the other state, and your voters will accuse you of compromising your principles. And Gov. Abbott might have to cool down his “Don’t California my Texas” rhetoric. (Though, c’mon, Greg, it ain’t so bad having all those In-N-Out Burgers and Trader Joe’s in your state, right?)

But a concerted effort to demand greater autonomy for both states—pursued jointly through politics, lawsuits, and even a constitutional amendment—would be healthy. You wouldn’t be able to blame the federal government for your own follies. Instead, California might actually have to confront how its oppressive environmental regulatory regime has made it impossible to build sufficient housing. And Texas might have to face how its lack of planning puts its people in flood plains that stand in the path of hurricanes.

And yes, I know you might miss the good times, when your states were politically aligned with the federal government. But admit it: Even those times weren’t easy, and your federal friends are never that friendly.

President Obama, after all, was little help to California during its housing and budget crises. And President Trump’s trade protectionism is causing headaches for Texas, which has invested heavily in infrastructure and companies that support international trade, especially with its neighbor, Mexico.

Your two states also have more common ground than you might think, even on immigration. While the federal government under Obama and Trump oversaw massive and inhumane deportation of your residents, your two states have invested in educating young immigrants, including the undocumented. It’s no accident that 350,000 of the estimated 800,000 “Dreamers” call one of your two states home.

To get the talks started, California should immediately revoke its counterproductive ban on government-funded travel to Texas. Yes, the Lone Star State has some awfully discriminatory laws on adoption by LGBTQ families, but how do you change minds if you can’t meet with people? And you two governors seem to have a civil relationship: You issued joint statements about natural disasters and the Dodgers-Astros World Series last fall.

Each of your states offers places where a visitor from the other would be comfortable. Why not start the talks in Austin, a chunk of California in the heart of Texas, where Apple employs more than 6,000 people? In California, I can see Gov. Brown taking his Texas counterpart to oil-rich Bakersfield, where you two could chat at Wool Growers, a terrific restaurant serving the food of the Basques—a people who know something about the fight for sovereignty.

I’m not expecting you to produce the political equivalent of “Pancho and Lefty,” the iconic joint album of California’s late Merle Haggard and Texas’s Willie Nelson. (Though bringing Willie to the summit is not a bad idea.) But developing a strong working relationship will be important if Washington totally melts down, and creates a constitutional crisis for the republic, as many fear. In that case, California and Texas will have to put things back together.

In the meantime, regular California-Texas summits would remind us that, while we will never be the most cohesive country, we are a collection of states that requires some unity.

And that, in a country as diverse as ours, there may be no agreement as powerful as an agreement to disagree.

The post Forget North and South Korea. California and Texas Really Need a Peace Summit. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.