A lot could be said about this:
…but foremost in my thoughts is this nagging question: Were there so many Tren de Aragua in Aurora, Colorado that the Aurora municipal police were unable to cope with them? If so, what about the Colorado State Police? Were they outnumbered as well? What made federal intervention necessary?
One of the premises of America’s federal structure is the idea that when possible, local problems should be handled locally, by local forces, with local resources. (The Catholic Church calls this subsidiarity, but it’s the same in all respects.) So a federal intervention would imply that local forces were inadequate to cope with the Tren de Aragua infestation. Was that really the case?
The Founding Fathers were confident that state and local authorities, jealous of their power and status, would resist attempts by the federal government to subsume their powers into itself. Yet over the decades, Washington’s has intruded ever more deeply into the concerns and operations of local and state governments. Ironically, more often than not it’s been with the states’ active cooperation.
Our federal structure is gradually losing its federalism. The state and local governments are being reduced to administrative divisions whose only function is to implement federal policies. Left-wing commentators probably approve. In fact, back in the early Nineties a Leftist opinion writer whose name I’ve forgotten wrote plainly that the time had come to abolish the state governments! He even dared to assert that it would “complete the job the Founding Fathers started.”
Once again: I’m no fan of government. But federalism was one of the features that was supposed to make the existence of a national government tolerable: by confining it to responsibilities that are truly national. Perhaps a great part of the troubles Americans face today from overweening government can be traced to the demise of federalism. After all, it’s a lot easier for an irate citizenry to hang a local miscreant than one far away in the District of Columbia.
Just an early-morning thought.
1 comments
You can pick any big city in the U.S. even the city with the highest crime rate and in that city at least half of the police man hours will be spent in writing tickets for traffic infractions. The reason is simple and logical; it is a money maker. I am sure that a reporter could through a FOIA request get an accurate count on how many traffic infraction tickets were issued during the weeks that all of this gang crime wave was occurring.