States Rights are About Power

 Donald Trump has often cited States’ Rights in his policy decisions and general opinions, which is why the hypocrisy of his executive order “Protecting American Energy from State Overreach” is so egregiously obnoxious. State overreach? I thought it was federal overreach that most conservatives find so irksome. How can a state even have overreach. It’s not infringing upon anything outside of itself. 

The tension between states’ rights and federal governance has been part of United States culture since the American Revolution. After the Revolution, each state could have become its own country. Initially, states were operating much on their own without a strong central power, but over time it became clear that more could be accomplished with stronger unity and pooling of resources. 

States rights was the rallying cry of the South leading up to the American Civil War. South Carolina became the first state to secede from the union on December 6^th of 1860. South Carolina had previously threatened to secede in 1832 over tariffs imposed by the federal government on imported goods. In 1850, South Carolina faced another session crisis when California joined the United States as a free state. 

Touting the virtues of States’ Rights has long been a conservative method of infringing on human rights on issues ranging from slavery to restrictions on abortion. It’s never really about states’ rights. It’s about control. In the case of slavery, control over human property. In the case of abortion, control over women’s rights to self-determination, and in the case of this recent attempt to create polices that infringe on states’ rights to protect the environment, control over environmental resources.