Patrick Henry Was Right

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

 

I don’t know that I’m 100 percent ready to agree with Leighton Woodhouse that “the hysterical pussy hats were right,” but I am very much convinced that the anti-federalists were, and that that fact ultimately is more consequential.

 

One of the arguments put forward to excuse or minimize the aggression—and the brutality—of ICE’s campaign in Minneapolis is that federal agents cannot rely on the cooperation of state and local authorities when operating in a sanctuary city in a state where the governor was the 2024 Democratic nominee for the vice presidency. So (goes this argument) rather than ask the local police to intervene when, e.g., protesters partly block a street or otherwise inconvenience federal agents, ICE agents really have no choice but to take aggressive action on their own, and that such action is justified by its necessity.

 

Like so much of what one hears from apologists for Donald Trump and his administration, this is a fundamentally un-American point of view, one that misunderstands the nature of our constitutional order.

 

The United States has divided powers, checks and balances, federalism, subsidiarity, and all the rest of it by design—the fact that the president cannot simply send men marching into Minneapolis and take over the city without opposition is a strength of our system rather than a shortcoming of it. Forcing the federal government and the states and cities into negotiation with one another is the point.

 

The federal government that we have today was created by the states to handle certain corporate needs and projects that are of an inherently interstate or national character, prominent among those needs being defense against foreign adversaries, the regulation of interstate commerce, the conduct of international relations, etc. It is Congress and not the president that is entrusted with the premier powers: to declare war, to ratify treaties, to impose federal taxes, etc. But Congress, at the moment, refuses to do its job, its members choking on self-importance even as they abandon self-respect.

 

While the Constitution has little to say about immigration beyond giving Congress—not the president—the power “to establish a uniform rule of naturalization,” immigration and citizenship have long been classified alongside those other inherently national affairs. As a union of sovereign states, our republic has built into it an unusual and complex—by design!—arrangement when it comes to sovereignty. Federal sovereignty is superimposed on state sovereignty and predominates where federal law conflicts with state law, but, at the same time, the federal government is forbidden to commandeer state governments or those of the municipalities in the states. That is why it is possible to have, among other innovations, “sanctuary” cities and states, where local law-enforcement agencies may decline (or may be forbidden) to cooperate with federal immigration agents.

 

Support for a policy of genuinely open borders in the United States is negligible. At a very high level of generality, most Americans (including most Democrats and progressives) agree with Trump that it would be better to enforce our immigration laws than to allow them to go generally unenforced, and most of us would prefer a system of immigration that is well-ordered to one that is anarchic; at the level of immediate specificity, many Americans, myself included, believe that the administration’s actions in dispatching thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents to places such as Minneapolis are an exercise in punitive political theater rather than an exercise in enforcing immigration law. Immigration enforcement is, like many needful things, a matter of “Yes, but.”

 

Free societies are complicated and require a good deal of negotiation and compromise when it comes to conflicting dynamics of that kind. The American constitutional order is set up for precisely that sort of thing; the emerging presidential autocracy, based on unilateral executive actions that far exceed the powers the Constitution actually invests in the presidency, is entirely alien to that American tradition and—as we can see right in front of our noses, if we are inclined to look—bound to cause trouble.

 

Some of us cynics might even note that the Republicans’ evident and comfortable sloth when it comes to taking even the most elementary of steps toward reform—such baby steps as mandating the use of E-Verify or some similar system to keep illegal immigrants out of the work force—bespeaks a certain lack of genuine seriousness about the issue. Republicans apparently are happy to dispatch masked gun thugs into the streets of cities with Democratic mayors to punish partisan opponents, but reforming how basic workplace paperwork gets done is, apparently, a project that is going to be decades and decades in the making. We have a lot of show ponies but very few workhorses in our political life.

 

Congressional dereliction is the demagogue’s fuel.

 

In the debates over the drafting of the Constitution, the anti-federalists, led by such patriots as Patrick Henry, argued that the framers were laying down a foundation for potential tyranny: a president with too much of the monarch about him, a federal government inadequately constrained, state powers (states have powers, not rights) improperly diminished. And they were, in many respects, correct: While there is much that is great and admirable about our constitutional order, can there really be any question that the political currents in American history have been almost uniformly toward nationalization and centralization—for better and for worse? That federal agents should be acting like an encamped Hessian garrison in Minneapolis is not an inevitable outcome of that nationalizing tendency, but it is the actual outcome, here in the real world. This is the mess we have made.

 

It is an American problem with an American solution.

 

President Donald Trump won an election, but so did Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey. We divide political power for many good reasons, including the swinish characters of men such as Trump together with the servility and self-moronizing passions of those who follow such demagogues. It is evident, from the scene in Minneapolis, that we have not divided that power sufficiently. One morally depraved game show host is all it took to send things off the rails.

 

It may be that, like me, you do not care very much for the unwise policy of declaring “sanctuary cities.” But you should care for the underlying political superstructure that makes that unwise policy possible—it is fundamental to American liberty.

The End of Roe and the Curse of Self-Governance

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 24, 2022

 

“Abortion presents a profound moral question,” reads the Supreme Court’s momentous decision overruling the precedents that prevented states from passing restrictive abortion laws. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority.”

 

That is inarguable. It was, in fact, one of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s primary sources of frustration with the precedents established by the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. By invalidating anti-abortion laws in dozens of states, the decision arrested the process of establishing a durable legal equilibrium that experimentation among the states produces. This is also one of the reasons that Roe proved so durable over the last 50 years despite its indefensibly dubious legal rationale.

 

That process of experimentation begins again today, and it will be messy. It’s going to be downright icky, in fact. The legal bulwark that took the question of abortion out of the hands of lawmakers also freed the voting public from consequences associated with their views. For a half-century, voters and their representatives could enjoy the courage of their convictions on abortion without the associated repercussions. No longer. Americans will once again be compelled to think about, talk about, and legislate on the issue of abortion.

 

“The Nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated,” the Court’s decision continues, adding, “the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.” We can expect the states to do precisely that. There will be a burst of enthusiasm both for and against abortion rights at the state level. Their respective legislatures will test the parameters of this new legal environment. Maximalists on both sides of the issue are likely to push their representatives, many of whom are most responsive to maximalists on every issue, to say and do things that will make most everyone else squeamish.

 

Quite unlike engaged partisans, most Americans are conflicted when it comes to abortion. Polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of American adults did not want to see Roe overturned. Even if you’re inclined to parse that language, it’s a finding that suggests between six- and seven-in-ten Americans do not want abortion to be illegal in most or all cases. That doesn’t mean they’re comfortable with the practice.

 

Those same polls find that majorities prefer to see restrictions on elective abortions roughly after the 14th week of pregnancy. These views are informed as much by the public’s understanding of law as their religious and moral views, and they tend to be reinforced by personal experience with the practice. These views may not sound well-reasoned to partisans who spend a lot of time thinking about abortion, but that’s the problem. Most Americans do not spend a lot of time thinking about abortion.

 

“Americans’ convictions on abortion, we learned, encounter inconvenient exceptions and questions with neither clear answers nor venues to sort through them,” read a recent TIME magazine spread featuring the voices of “hundreds” of Americans on the issue. “Attitudinal complexity leaves many Americans feeling sidelined and displaced for their abortion views: ill-fitting in the Democrat and Republican parties, imperfectly aligned within religious traditions, unwilling to join activist movements that don’t readily invite equivocation or gradation.” Because they perceive themselves to be so out of step with the loudest voices in the room, these Americans keep their views to themselves. And while Roe was the law of the land, they didn’t have to think—much less talk—much about abortion.

 

That’s all over now. American politicians who cater to the minority of voters who are utterly unconflicted when it comes to abortion rights will have to act on their preferences. Some states will enact restrictions on the practice that functionally ban it. Others will loosen their abortion laws, perhaps allowing mothers to electively terminate a pregnancy in its final stages. These extremes will profoundly discomfit the majority of Americans who previously enjoyed the luxury of not having to think about any of this.

 

Of course, that is what the justices who crafted and joined this decision explicitly intended. Pro-abortion activists who insist that their voices have been silenced by this decision have it precisely backward. They have been liberated to pursue their visions for social organization, as have their opponents. What Americans do with this new liberty matters more now than it has for decades. The Court has compelled the millions of Americans who sat on the sidelines over the last 50 years to get in the game, whether they want to or not.

 

The voting public may bitterly resent being drafted into the process of self-determination, especially since the subject matter at issue is unsettling. The process will produce winners and losers. Competition among the states to satisfy their constituents on this matter will be fraught and will contribute to social tensions. But it will also contribute to the establishment of the sort of national equilibrium on the issue Justice Ginsburg envisioned. That is how our system functions and why it endures.

 

The miracle of American self-governance is a blessing and a curse. On this aspect of the social contract, the nation’s voters outsourced their sovereignty to the courts for too long. That’s over now. And maybe, in the end, it will be for the best.

Give Diversity a Chance

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, November 21, 2021

 

Roe v. Wade is, by American standards, an ancient controversy — one that seems likely to be resolved in the near future in a way that progressives are not going to like.

 

There is some poetic justice in that.

 

Abortion wasn’t much of a national issue until abortion-rights advocates made it one, the matter having previously been regulated on a state-by-state basis. Progressives, who think of society as one big factory to be managed scientifically according to Taylorist principles, instinctively recoil from genuine diversity and the spontaneous heterogeneity of organic society. They have long sought to impose standardization on American life, homogenizing everything from labor markets to education to abortion rights. For years, their principle instrument of social homogenization was the Supreme Court. One of the great successes of the conservative movement has been effectively closing off that option for the Left, which was so discomfited by the loss that progressives turned hysterically toward self-discrediting court-packing schemes.

 

Abortion is an old fight. But the oldest argument about the government of the United States remains, after all these years, unresolved: What is it?

 

Before there were Republicans and Democrats, there were Federalists and Anti-Federalists. They were divided on many issues, most notably the proposed constitution of 1787. The fundamental split was between those who wanted a more coherent national government and those who wanted to preserve the United States’ — the word is plural — original character, that of a union of states. And this division has echoed through the ages: The crackpot libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard, who loathed the Federalists and described “Generalissimo Washington” as the original enemy of American liberty, dreamed of abandoning the Constitution and returning to the Articles of Confederation.

 

The epigones of the Federalists in our time would like to declare victory and consider the matter settled. In their view, the national government of the United States is like the national government of France, with Washington owing Austin or Sacramento hardly any more deference than Paris owes to Besançon or Strasbourg. Conservatives for some time couched their enduring Anti-Federalism in the erroneous language of “states’ rights,” but states do not have rights — states have powers. In fact, our constitutional order is designed in such a way that states have most of the powers. The federal government has certain enumerated powers touching questions that are inescapably national in character — war, international trade, etc. — with the Tenth Amendment articulating the arrangement: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The Tenth Amendment may not make the lines perfectly clear, but it does make it undeniable that there are lines.

 

Taking the doctrine of enumerated powers seriously would have far-reaching consequences for the federal government — the people who call themselves “constitutional conservatives” are in their way more radical than the radical libertarians.

 

Here, we need a little nomenclatural hygiene: When conservatives today talk about federalism, we are talking about something related to the Anti-Federalist sensibility, emphasizing the character of the United States as a union of states, each sovereign within its own borders, rather than a unitary national state such as that of France or China. What such federalism should mean as a practical matter is that important social questions that are not international in nature should be managed mainly by the state legislatures. For the conservative federalist in 2021, ending the Roe regime would mean not a national prohibition on abortion but turning the question over to the state legislatures with the understanding that the democratic settlements that are reached in Utah and Oklahoma will be different from those reached in New Jersey and California.

 

The notion of incorporation of the Bill of Rights (mistaken, in my view, but that is a cause so near to being well and truly lost that insisting on it amounts to an eccentricity) and treating it as a limit on state governments rather than on the U.S. government alone complicates things, but there is no constitutional or political reason that firearms regulation, to take one example, has to be precisely the same in Manhattan as it is in rural Nevada. Just as local laws vary when it comes to First Amendment-related issues such as organizing public rallies and parades or operating a media company, there are a number of quite different local legal arrangements that would all be consistent with the Second Amendment.

 

There are 128 million households across 50 states — ideological fanaticism is the only reason to believe that each and every one of them must be subject to a completely uniform regulatory environment with that homogeneity enforced at the point of federal bayonets.

 

Even on very consequential questions such as abortion, conservatives with a healthy respect for federalism are willing to give authentic diversity a chance. Progressives should think about joining us in this.

Silencing the Culture Wars?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, June 20, 2021

 

The political fight over firearms regulation is not a matter of public safety but a matter of culture war. If you doubt that, consider a related case: We still have on the books anti-switchblade laws that were adopted by states such as Colorado in a national moral panic following the premiere of West Side Story. Without those knife-control laws, the United States surely would have degenerated into a dystopian hellscape straight from the minds of . . . Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.

 

We should be so lucky. But we Americans remain hostages to the movies, as the pending fight over Texas’s “silencer” law surely will demonstrate.

 

Sound suppressors — popularly known as “silencers” to the great irritation of the sort of person who will officiously correct you if you say “clip” when you mean “magazine” — are commonplace items throughout much of the world, including in most of Europe, where some shooting clubs will go so far as to require their use as a matter of courtesy. In many European countries, you can buy a suppressor at a sporting-goods store with no more paperwork than is required to buy a pair of hiking boots. In real life, a firearm equipped with a suppressor doesn’t make that cute little “pew!” sound that it emits when James Bond is using one — it sounds like a gun going off, but more quietly.

 

Suppressors are popular with hunters who do not wish to have their hearing damaged but also find it difficult to handle a rifle deftly while wearing gigantic protective earmuffs.

 

In the United States, we have a cumbrous federal regulatory apparatus under which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives regulates the sale and transfer of suppressors in accordance with the National Firearms Act of 1934. (The states add another level of potential regulation, but suppressors are legal in all but eight of them.) Acquiring a suppressor requires a considerable pile of paperwork, an extensive background check, the payment of a special federal transfer tax, etc. The waiting time for getting approval can run more than a year. On top of that, lending someone a suppressor can put both of you at risk of becoming federal felons, and so those who own suppressors sometimes take the extraordinary step of forming a legal trust to take ownership of the accessory, so that family members who have been added to the trust can take the suppressor down to the shooting range without legal peril.

 

Texas means to change that — and, if it is successful, Texas’s effort will change a lot more than the noise level at the shooting ranges in Houston. The firearms may be muffled, but the regulatory shot will be heard from coast to coast.

 

Under the freshly signed Texas legislation, it will be legal for a Texas resident to buy a suppressor manufactured and sold in Texas without any federal permission, on the theory that the federal government’s regulatory powers under the “interstate commerce” clause are limited to — radical idea! — interstate commerce.

 

This is a theory that has been considered — and rejected — more than once by the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court has on many occasions demonstrated its ability to get things wrong consistently for long periods of time. The most infamous of the abuses of the interstate-commerce clause was blessed by the Court in the case of Wickard v. Filburn. Among the economically illiterate superstitions that captivated the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt was the idea that American businesses were simply too productive, and it therefore ordered limits on the production of certain products, including wheat, in order to save Americans from the terrors of material abundance and low prices. Roscoe Filburn, a farmer in Ohio, ignored the federal limits on wheat production, because he was not involved in interstate commerce — the wheat was being consumed on his own farm rather than sold on the open market. But the feds disagreed and Filburn lost his case, with the Court creating, ex nihilo, an outrageously broad interpretation of federal powers: Filburn’s actions were neither interstate nor commerce, but the Court reasoned that they might produce a “substantial economic effect on interstate commerce,” if, for example, Filburn’s growing his own wheat kept him from buying wheat commercially grown in Pennsylvania. Wickard’s standard creates a federal power without limitation: Washington could, under this reasoning, superintend parallel-parking rules in Tuscaloosa, Ala., under the theory that a car parked ten inches from the curb rather than six inches might interfere with an Amazon delivery van and thereby exert a “substantial economic effect on interstate commerce” at least as great as Roscoe Filburn’s. This expansive and ridiculous line of argument was unfortunately endorsed by, among others, Justice Antonin Scalia, in the case of Gonzales v. Raich, in which California argued that the federal government had no legitimate power to forbid the medicinal use of marijuana grown in California by California residents within California’s borders.

 

The inflation of the interstate-commerce power has been opposed both by libertarians skeptical of federal economic regulation and by progressives who seek a freer hand in drug policy and other matters within the states they control. One hopes that the Californians remember Gonzales v. Raich as the Texas suppressor law works its way through the courts, rather than responding with the usual cry of the culture war: “Eek!”

 

We have a different Supreme Court today than we had when Gonzales v. Raich was under consideration — a Court that is more conservative, if not wildly so. (You might call it not radically conservative but conservatively conservative.) Upholding Texas’s right to regulate what happens within its own borders would invite — it would practically force — the reconsideration and reduction of federal regulatory powers touching everything from drugs to agriculture to environmental standards. That would cause some political upheaval and economic uncertainty, but it would also help to reestablish one of the underappreciated and seemingly forgotten facts of American life: We have 50 states for a reason. For that outcome, to which the question of suppressor regulation is only incidental, a period of considerable regulatory disorder is a price worth paying.

 

Resurrecting a more robust model of federalism — recognizing that New Jersey can be New Jersey while Texas is Texas — could help to dissipate some of the culture-war energy that has made our politics, especially our presidential elections, such a horror-show in recent years. But that kind of effective federalism requires that both sides agree to let the other side be — and there is much more political juice to be had by taking the opposite approach and nationalizing every issue and every disagreement. Political careers are not made by minding one’s own business and cultivating contentedness. In this regard, the political branches have failed us. Perhaps the Supreme Court will do better this time.

 

On this matter, the Court owes us more than silence.

How Federalism Thwarts Dystopia

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, March 23, 2021

 

There is a fun web game called “Redraw the States,” which lets you reimagine the 2020 presidential election by moving counties from one state to another. The idea is to flip the results of the election in as few moves as possible. For example, Donald Trump would have won in 2020 if the votes of just three counties – Philadelphia (Pa.), Fulton (Ga.), and Wayne (Mich.) — had been reassigned to California or some other Democratic state. The opposite strategy — turning blue states red by annexing Republican counties to them — is a little more difficult, or at least I found it so, because Republican votes tend to be spread out over a greater number of less densely populated counties. So, you could have flipped a state to the Trump column by adding in the votes of Lubbock County, Texas (120,000 votes, two-thirds of them for Trump) to Georgia, but finding the votes to flip Pennsylvania or Michigan in a single Trump county is a lot more difficult. The counties that Biden won have in total 67 million more residents than the counties that Trump won.

 

I imagine that both of my Democratic readers already are thinking: “Reassigning the votes of a handful of dense, urban, and disproportionately black counties to California is effectively the same thing as taking them right off the map, which is, of course, what Republicans are trying to do by making it more difficult to vote.” The broad objection to the Electoral College is similar: that our state-centered presidential elections have the effect of quarantining big-city votes in a handful of states instead of allowing their effects to be distributed across the country as they would if we had a single national popular election for president. Lately that has worked to the advantage of Republicans in two ways: by reducing the effect of the very large Democratic majorities in California and by not reducing the effect of the smaller Republican majorities in Texas and Florida. In 2020, Joe Biden won California’s 55 electoral votes by a margin of 29 percent, while Donald Trump won the 38 electoral votes of Texas and the 29 electoral votes of Florida by only 5.6 percent and 3.4 percent, respectively. Put another way, the 11 million votes that Biden got in California earned him 55 electoral votes, while the roughly equal number of votes Trump won in Texas and Florida combined won him 65 electoral votes. Biden’s advantage of 5 million votes in California was of less worth in terms of electoral votes than was Trump’s advantage of about 1 million votes in Texas and Florida combined.

 

There are many factors that go into that, including the fact that Republican presidential candidates more or less forgo campaigning in California and other states in which they are not realistically competitive, while Democrats will put up a pretty good fight in Florida (and, to a lesser extent, in Texas) because they believe they can win there.

 

It is impossible to disprove a counterfactual, but I strongly suspect that if in 2000 George W. Bush had won the notional “popular vote” while Al Gore won in the Electoral College, or if Hillary Rodham Clinton had won an electoral victory over Trump in 2016 without winning more votes nationally, then we would be hearing a good deal less from Democrats about the purported injustice of the Electoral College. (Facebook would be a happier place, too, if the Democrats hadn’t needed someone to blame for 2016 and settled on Mark Zuckerberg rather than, say, their incompetent candidate.) But that is not how our particular democratic cookie crumbles.

 

It is (entirely too) easy to oversimplify this. For example, taking Philadelphia, Fulton, and Wayne counties off the electoral map by consigning them to the oblivion of California or Connecticut would affect more white voters than black ones (each of those counties has a larger white population than black population) but would affect black voters disproportionately (each of those counties is more than 40 percent black in a country that is 13 percent black), while our current arrangement tends to amplify the influence of voters in such largely white states as Wyoming and North Dakota.

 

This is particularly galling from the point of view of the gross majoritarians when it comes to Senate seats, which, unlike Electoral College votes, are distributed among the states with no regard for population at all: Why, they demand, should the half-million people of Wyoming enjoy as much Senate clout as the 40 million people of California?

 

Again, reality is complicated: While small-state voters are disproportionately white and Republican, this is not a straightforwardly partisan issue, either: The same arrangement that benefits Republican Wyoming also lifts up the voice of our lightly populated second-whitest state, Soviet Bernistan.

 

The point of view of the gross majoritarians makes sense only if the states don’t. And so it is no surprise to find voices ranging from the dopey Left to the zany Left calling for the abolition of the states: Writing in Jacobin, Rob Hunter dismisses the states as “an ignoble legacy from the early history of the republic,” part of “American federalism’s long tradition of strangling popular sovereignty and democratic equality in the knots of competing and multiple state jurisdictions.” Lawrence R. Samuel, writing in the Washington Post, insists that diminished regional differences have turned “the once radical proposition of the ‘United States’ into an anachronism that now has little or no real value.”

 

I find myself agreeing with the gentleman from Jacobin in his assessment but not his conclusion: Yes, federalism and many other aspects of American government are very much designed to strangle popular sovereignty and to frustrate democratic equality by dividing power into competing jurisdictions. I think he has it about right when he writes: “Federalism multiplies the loci of power that must be captured by popular movements seeking to transform the capitalist state, or even just win some advances within it.”

 

I differ from Rob Hunter in that I thank God for it.

 

Why do we have states at all?

 

(Why, for that matter, do we still have counties when we have no counts, while we have no shires in spite of our having so many sheriffs?)

 

Hunter supplies part of the answer to his own question: Dismissing the value of the states as theaters for policy innovation, he writes: “History has shown how those little ‘laboratories of democracy’ are just as likely to be run by mad scientists as they are by benevolent researchers.” Indeed, they are. But what is true of the small ones also is true of the big ones, as 20th-century and 21st-century national governments broadly allied to Jacobin’s view of the world amply demonstrated by murdering some 100 million people in labor camps and gulags and through the use of such innovative tools as mass starvation as an instrument of political discipline. These United States are one of the few polities in the world that can be characterized accurately as enjoying open borders — between the states — which makes fleeing bad public policy and abusive government relatively easy. Relocating from California to Texas is pretty straightforward.

 

(It is a hell of a lot easier than relocating from Texas to, say, Switzerland.)

 

If you happen to be advancing a fundamentally totalitarian view of the world that recognizes no legitimate sphere of private life outside of political control that rejects liberalism and pluralism and the rule of law itself, and that deifies the “will of the people” — then, in such a situation, competing loci of power must be understood to be intolerable. Socialists are not content to live as socialists on their own terms — they insist that you must live as a socialist on their terms, too. (And if it comes down to it, better you than them: If a high-ranking apparatchik enjoys a dacha and an extra ration of caviar, then that’s really, somehow, the will of the people, too!) As libertarians sometimes put it: In a free society, there is no reason that a bunch of lefty crackpots couldn’t put together a worker-owned, democratically managed steel mill that supplies its product to a worker-owned, democratically managed automobile factory, which could build cars and distribute them in whatever way best satisfied its members’ sense of justice. (There will be only one sense of justice, because there can be only one — in the socialist republic, disagreement on that point is tantamount to treason.) But the opposite — a free-market subculture in a socialist society — would be impossible. Totalitarian politics is total on more than one front: total authority, total discretion, total reach. To fracture political power is to recognize limits on political power, which is an unthinkable thought for the totalitarian.

 

In the American context, the states are an embarrassment to the Left and an impediment to the Left’s increasingly totalist project. Hence the efforts to abolish them piece by piece: by dissolving the Electoral College, by deforming the Senate, by preempting state elections with a new Washington-run electoral system, by removing their discretion in financial matters, by supplanting local standards and practices in education and administration, etc.

 

Totalitarianism fully realized requires that there be nowhere to run. It ultimately requires defacing civilization to extirpate the genuine organic diversity of peoples, cultures, religion, regions, and modes of life. This is why socialist governments, for example, so reliably turn abusive and repressive when they are not outright genocidal. But socialism is not the only species of totalitarianism, and the current right-wing populist rhetoric that similarly deifies “We the People” is based on a similar set of assumptions. And what happens when “We the People” demand something We the People’s self-appointed populist spokesmen dislike? False consciousness, says the Marxist. Media bias and left-wing educators, says the rightist.

 

None of those gets to the facts about democracy, facts that were well understood by John Adams and others among our Founding Fathers: Democracy is at best a procedural convenience for choosing representatives and ensuring a minimum level of accountability in elected officials. Democracy is not a synonym for “good government” — often it is the opposite — and democratic is not another way of saying “decent” or “intelligent.” We all understand this at the moral margins: If the United States had had a national referendum on slavery in 1862, slavery would have won in a landslide. But we know slavery was wrong and needed to go. A century later, a national referendum on civil rights for the descendants of those slaves would have failed at the polls. The framers of the Constitution knew that We the People cannot be trusted very long or very far, which is why the most important of our liberties — freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, to keep and bear arms — were put in the Bill of Rights, placing them beyond the reach of mere democratic majorities. We the People need to be told “No!” pretty often and “Hell, no!” from time to time. Every time a populist initiative strips away some layer of insulation keeping the People from exercising direct power, it also strips away some layer of insulation protecting the People from having direct power exercised on them. Populism means government modeled on Twitter.

 

Hell, no.

 

The creator of “Redraw the States” offers it as an invitation to “weep at how arbitrary our electoral system is.” Arbitrary is offered as a synonym for undesirable or unfair, but the fact is that all voting systems have arbitrary rules. Why on earth we let 18-year-olds vote when we won’t sell them a handgun or a beer is a mystery to me. (No, I don’t want to lower the drinking age to 18 — I want to raise the voting age to 40.) Our system has a lot of pressure points and a lot of veto points, and it has them by design. And we are hardly the only country that has such measures in place: In Switzerland, for example, national referenda must win both a majority of the overall vote and a majority in a majority of the federation’s 26 cantons to take effect. That’s a high bar to clear, which is why Switzerland has no national minimum wage (thunderously rejected by 76 percent of voters) or a strict “corporate responsibility” law (approved by a majority of voters but not in a majority of cantons).

 

About a third of the U.S. population lives in just four states (California, Texas, Florida, and New York), but our system of government ensures that a handful of populous states cannot dominate the affairs of the entire nation. South Dakota soybean farmers have their own interests, distinct from — and sometimes rivalrous to — those of Wall Street financiers or Silicon Valley entrepreneur or low-income people in San Antonio. Federalism, properly understood and properly implemented, gives them a chance to say “Hell, no!” (or maybe just “No, thanks!”) to policies and laws reflecting values and priorities at odds with their own. Unhappily, our politics has for many years now run in the opposite direction: Rather than working to restrict the national government to matters that are genuinely national in character (foreign policy, immigration), the schemers and snoots and do-gooders and botherers have pushed Washington’s big ugly snout into every corner of American life — public life, yes, but increasingly into private life, too.

 

All systems based on definite rules can be manipulated, and all political systems include rules that are arbitrary. But our arbitrary rules serve a necessary purpose — or two: The first is giving people the means to put up roadblocks in front of nonsense, and the second is providing a means of escape when those roadblocks fail. If you would like to know more about the practical realities of living in a society with no means of internal exit, some of your immigrant neighbors might be able to fill you in.

 

The worst effects of leftish/progressive government in these United States can still be avoided by moving to a state with different practices. And people unhappy with the Republican dominance of Texas or Utah can always move to a Democrat-dominated state — there is more room in those states every day. The power of exit puts real pressure on dopes and miscreants and charlatans and fools such as Andrew Cuomo and, you know, every single sad-faced clown holding office in the extra-long stretch-limo clown car that is California. When the people pack up and go, so does the tax base, and politics is no fun at all without easy access to other people’s money, and lots of it.

 

Progressives prefer a world in which you cannot leave California even if you leave California, in which the Golden State really is a Hotel California from which you can check out but never escape. There’s a reason Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed a confiscatory tax on the assets of Americans who renounce their citizenship and move to another country.

 

Americans should think a little bit about why a particular political tendency would desire to create conditions making exit from its jurisdiction impossible.

Republicans Must Not Cave on Blue-State Bailouts

By Rick Scott

Saturday, December 12, 2020

 

Democrats have spent the last few months demanding bailouts for states and local governments. They claim that if you oppose spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out states such as New York, Illinois, and California, then you support laying off teachers, health-care workers, and first responders.

 

Guess what? They’re lying. And unfortunately, too many of my Republican colleagues have bought their lie and are getting ready to cave.

 

What Democrats really want is for Congress to just send money to liberal politicians who have already shown they can’t be trusted with it. If these politicians have budget shortfalls, it’s because they did not prioritize their struggling constituents in the first place, and instead wasted money on other things. New York and California are of course free to burn tax dollars for fun. But they shouldn’t expect Florida and the rest of the country to pay when the bill comes due.

 

I’ve argued all along that states have the ability to moderate the economic harm caused by the COVID pandemic through reasoned, balanced measures that protect citizens without destroying their economies. States also have taxing authority and the ability to borrow money if their fiscal situations get too dire.

 

The federal government can play a significant role in boosting the unemployment-insurance program, propping up small businesses to avoid layoffs, and investing in vaccine research, development, and distribution. But it shouldn’t write blank checks to poorly managed states.

 

Why? Well, first of all, we don’t even know how much of the $1 trillion allocated to states and local governments by the CARES Act has already been spent, and they won’t tell us. I and Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), have written multiple letters to every governor in America asking for a breakdown of how they’ve spent their states’ CARES Act money. Just ten of them have responded. Only in Washington does it make sense to consider sending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to states and local governments that refuse to tell us how, or even if, they’ve used the $1 trillion we sent them nine months ago.

 

Second of all, unemployment data show that states that have taken steps to responsibly and safely open up their economies are doing better than states that refuse to accept reality and science and stick with unnecessarily strict, destructive lockdowns. Thirty states have halved their unemployment rate since May while real GDP grew 33 percent in the third quarter, erasing losses from the previous quarter. Of the ten states with the lowest unemployment rates, nine are led by Republicans, and none currently have strict COVID lockdowns. Of the ten states with the highest unemployment rates, eight are run by Democrats, and many have stuck with economically ruinous lockdown measures. States have the option to get their economies open and improve their fiscal situations without relying on the federal government for a bailout. Some are just choosing not to.

 

Lastly, and most importantly, state revenues are up! States across the country are seeing a significant increase in revenue — in some cases, well above projections. As the Wall Street Journal reported, California’s revenue for this fiscal year is almost $10 billion above projections, while New York’s revenue increased more than 4 percent from September of 2019 to September of 2020.

 

All this is to say that states do not need bailouts; they want bailouts so they can use the money — intended to address the fallout from COVID — to plug the long-standing holes in their budgets and pension systems. It’s as simple as that.

 

Some of my Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill have bought the Democratic lie that preventing bailouts for liberal states would lead to disastrous consequences. They’re getting ready to capitulate and give hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to Governors Cuomo and Newsom and Pritzker, all of whom are refusing to open their states, get kids back in classrooms, and get their economies on the road to recovery.

 

Bailing out those who have done so much damage to their states and our country already would be a boondoggle of epic proportions. We must not let it happen.

Yes, the Feds Should Decriminalize Marijuana

National Review Online

Monday, December 07, 2020

 

We generally favor deferring to tradition, but the fact that Republicans have been wrong on marijuana for a very long time is no reason for them to keep being wrong.

 

And Republicans have it very wrong on marijuana — or all but five of them do: The House has passed a marijuana-decriminalization bill largely along partisan lines, with only five Republicans voting in support of the measure, while only six Democrats opposed it. The bill is expected to die in Mitch McConnell’s Senate.

 

It shouldn’t.

 

The current federal position on marijuana is the wrong one, both as a matter of federalist principle and as a matter of intelligent policy.

 

With various marijuana-liberalization programs working their way through the states (Oregon has decriminalized personal possession of most other drugs as well), there now exists a patchwork of marijuana laws across the country. Three cheers for the patchwork: This is a large, complex, and diverse country, and sometimes a political patchwork is the right alternative to enforced national homogeneity. The states have decided to go their own separate ways on this issue, Americans already have shown themselves perfectly capable of navigating a world in which Colorado and Florida have different marijuana laws, and federal law should recognize that reality.

 

Most ordinary crime is policed at the state level, and the interstate-commerce rationale for federal marijuana prohibition has always been weak. While there will remain a federal role when it comes to such considerations as international smuggling and interstate trade, the question of the sale and consumption of marijuana within states is a matter for the states. Republicans who say they believe in federalism should consider acting like it. The same vague interstate-commerce argument that empowers federal marijuana prohibition necessarily empowers federal mischief of many other kinds.

 

Current federal law puts many marijuana sellers and buyers in the position of being federal outlaws while transacting business that is, as a matter of state law, entirely legal. The Obama administration attempted to finesse this conundrum with the policy spelled out in the so-called Cole memo, in which the federal government committed itself to ignoring its own laws in states in which marijuana had been legalized; the Trump administration rescinded that policy; liberalizers have expressed some hope that the Biden administration might reinstate it. That kind of chaotic adhocracy is typical of our contemporary political dysfunction, and Congress should settle this as a matter of statute rather than having policy swing back and forth via administrative fiat every time the White House changes hands. It is the job of the lawmakers to make law, and Congress ought to do its job rather than punting to whomever happens to be in the top job at the Justice Department.

 

Drug abuse and drug addiction impose serious personal and social costs, as indeed does a great deal of casual drug use. We have seen this not only in the case of prohibited drugs such as marijuana but also in the case of generally legal drugs such as alcohol and some pain medications. The question is not whether we are in favor of marijuana use or against it, but rather is whether current policy is genuinely in the public interest. It isn’t. Marijuana prohibition creates a vastly profitable criminal enterprise that causes far more damage, including loss of life — at home and abroad — than marijuana consumption itself does or would even if use became more widespread. Prohibition makes petty criminals out of most Americans — the majority of Americans smoke marijuana at some point in life — and in the process acclimates both individuals and institutions to low-grade criminality. It results in needless incarceration and in criminal convictions that can severely circumscribe a person’s opportunities for advancement and prosperity. It creates opportunities for selective enforcement and prosecution. The so-called war on drugs has contributed mightily to the militarization of many local police forces, to the normalization of invasive domestic surveillance, and to heavy-handedness in policing. That is a high price to pay for a policy that is — this is worth remembering — almost entirely ineffective in preventing the widespread use of marijuana and the commerce attached to it.

 

The recent House bill is imperfect. Removing marijuana from the list of federally controlled substances is a good policy, and vacating the convictions of certain low-level federal drug offenders is the right policy, too, albeit one that should be implemented with caution. But this being the United States — and this being a Democratic bill — there is an excise tax attached, which is the wrong policy in that it would in one sense expand the federal footprint in the marijuana trade rather than reduce it. Those who cry, “Legalize it and tax it!” have it half right, but only half. The bill is also larded up with patronage spending in the form of small-business and community-group grants that would distribute those federal marijuana-tax funds to political clients. Our national experience with the role of state and local governments in casino gambling should have taught us that there is a world of difference between sensible reform and making government a revenue-seeking partner in a pestilential business.

 

As a matter of pure political calculation, Republicans might note that marijuana reform is very popular among constituencies they need to court, and that marijuana initiatives did very well on Election Day in such conservative states as Montana and South Dakota. In fact, every single marijuana-liberalization proposal that was on the ballot in November passed, from New Jersey to Mississippi.

 

The all-encompassing war on drugs has been a lost cause for decades, and Republican voters know it — Republican elected officials should admit as much, too.

Against Columbia Statehood

National Review Online

Friday, June 26, 2020

 

Breathes there a citizen of this great republic who believes that the most pressing problem in America today is that Washington, D.C., and its denizens simply do not have enough influence on the national government? To listen to House Democrats, you would think so. But this is actually about simple partisanship. The District of Columbia — our national capital district, named for Christopher Columbus — has only once in its history, barely in 1972, given 20 percent of its presidential vote to a Republican. Its local government has been wholly dominated by the Democratic Party for all of living memory. Agitation for D.C. statehood is about partisan advantage, no more and no less.

 

Friday’s D.C. statehood vote in the House is also entirely symbolic. Only a constitutional amendment can convert the seat of the federal government into a state. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gave Congress plenary local lawmaking power to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District” — the broadest power Congress exercises anywhere. The 23rd Amendment, passed by Congress at the urging of Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in 1960, gave D.C. the votes in presidential elections that it would have as a state. But it defines D.C. as a permanent constitutional entity of its own, outside of statehood. The Justice Department has repeatedly concluded, under administrations of both parties, that D.C. statehood requires amending the Constitution. That isn’t going to happen. The last time an amendment was tried, in the 1970s, only 16 states signed on.

 

On the merits of the proposal, it is difficult to see how the people of D.C. are oppressed, easy to see how their influence is already disproportionate, and easier than ever to see why the federal government would be imperiled by subjecting its physical security to District authorities. True, the Founding Fathers did not anticipate a time when the federal district would have more residents than Vermont. But early Americans also never conceived a time when the federal government would spend 4.5 trillion dollars a year and employ more people in D.C. alone than the entire populations of Syracuse or Dayton.

 

DC’s median household income varied from 95.6 percent to 107 percent of the national average between 1990 and 2007. Today, it is 136.9 percent, higher than that of any state. There is nearly one federal job for every four residents in D.C., and much of the District’s private employment is in satellites of federal power. D.C.’s suburbs are now the wealthiest places in the nation, and uniquely recession-proof. The District was more than 70 percent African American as recently as 1980, and racial justice is often cited as a reason to grant it statehood. In the past decade, however, it has ceased to be majority-black. But the District’s rapidly changing demographics have not altered its monochromatic partisanship.

 

Accretion of too much federal power in the capital was one problem foreseen by the Founders: Madison wrote in Federalist No. 43 that “the gradual accumulation of public improvements at the stationary residence of the government would be both too great a public pledge to be left in the hands of a single State, and would create so many obstacles to a removal of the government, as still further to abridge its necessary independence.” The other problem is that the federal government’s national authority could effectively be held hostage by a hostile local government. Madison foresaw that too: without federal control of the capital, he wrote, “the public authority might be insulted and its proceedings interrupted with impunity,” and “a dependence of the members of the general government on the State comprehending the seat of the government, for protection in the exercise of their duty, might bring on the national councils an imputation of awe or influence” to the detriment of other states. Madison lived to see the capital burned when the Maryland militia could not protect it, and a generation after his death, Virginia seceded and Maryland’s loyalty hung in doubt.

 

Today, that threat is back out in the open. In recent weeks, Muriel Bowser, the mayor of the city, has lobbied for statehood as an expansion of her authority at federal expense:

 

I think what we saw from this president is something that we haven’t seen in our city, and that was federal troops on the ready, federal police, policing a local city, National Guard troops hauled in from all over the country. So I decided, when we saw those federal police out on D.C. streets, that we had to push back.

 

We have criticized Trump’s blustery and overly broad assertions of federal authority, but the answer is not to make presidential or congressional power permanently subordinate to a single local official. We have seen in New York and California efforts to use state power over the president’s tax returns as a lever of control over the chief executive. Holding every future Republican presidency hostage to a hostile D.C. mayor’s control of the streets is once again not a far-fetched possibility. The United States should not aspire to be Revolutionary France, with the nation’s government subject to the whim of the capital’s mobs.

 

D.C. statehood is neither necessary nor likely to happen, and its proponents have not thought through its consequences — or worse, they have.

Where Does the Money Go? Where Should It?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, May 17, 2020

With the debate over additional epidemic aid to the states simmering, Florida senator Rick Scott and New York governor Andrew Cuomo are taking a special interest in one another.

Senator Scott used to be Governor Scott. He took office in Florida in 2011, three days after Cuomo did in New York. The two states had a lot in common at the time: Both had been hammered by the financial crisis, both had lost a lot of jobs during that crisis, and—this part is sometimes forgotten—both had seen significant numbers of residents moving elsewhere.

After having led the country in net domestic migration (meaning people moving from one part of the United States to another) for years, Florida had slipped behind Texas in 2006—and by 2008, it was losing population to other states. Both New York and Florida began to make modest population recoveries in 2010, but New York’s petered out. Between 2010 and 2019, its net domestic migration decline was almost 1.4 million people. Florida has kept growing. It surpassed New York as the third-most-populous state in 2014. New York is probably going to lose a House seat after the next census; it already is losing part of its tax base to Florida, as even Governor Cuomo has been forced to admit.

How bad is it? New York officials currently are scrutinizing dentists’ records and veterinarians’ bills to make sure that former New Yorkers who have relocated to Florida aren’t exceeding their quota of New York days. “If you’re a high earner in New York and you move to Florida, your chances of a residency audit are 100 percent,” Barry Horowitz of WithumSmith+Brown, an accounting firm, told CNBC.

Who wouldn’t want to sign up for that?

New York has a very lopsided tax system, with 1 percent of taxpayers coughing up almost half of the state’s income-tax revenue. Every time New York loses a Carl Icahn to Florida, the state treasury feels the pinch.

Florida is happy to have New York’s former taxpayers. And New York’s former taxpayers have reason to be happy in Florida.

“Look at Cuomo and me,” says Senator Scott. “We were elected at the same time. I went about trying to recruit companies and people to move to Florida. We had lost 832,000 jobs in four years. I went to New York to recruit companies, and Cuomo was livid. At first, the reaction was, ‘Nobody’s moving.’ By the time I left, people were moving in in droves. Why? New York’s budget is almost double Florida’s, but it has 2 million less people.” (If you want a flash fact-check: New York State’s budget in 2019 was $176 billion for 19.5 million people; Florida’s was $91 billion for 21.5 million people.) “People move out of New York because they’re sick and tired of the taxes, and now, instead of trying to control his budget, Cuomo wants Florida to pay extra.”

It wasn’t just New York. As governor, Scott says he was tempted to put up billboards taunting California’s governor at the time, Jerry Brown: “Same haircut. Lower taxes. Move to Florida.”

Florida Republicans believe, with good reason, that they have done a pretty good job of things and made a lot of those “hard choices” that Rick Scott talks about. Theirs has not been a perfect record, by any means. But compared to what’s been going on in Albany or Trenton, the ladies and gentlemen down in Tallahassee have done pretty good work. They are subtropical ants to Aesop’s grasshoppers up in New York and New Jersey.

Following up on the first pandemic aid package for the states, Nancy Pelosi now wants to push through another multi-trillion-dollar aid package, one that would include almost $1 trillion in unrestricted cash. Governor Cuomo would very much like to see that happen. Senator Scott is stepping on it. The latest House bill has been described as DOA by Senate Republicans, but Senator Scott also is blocking a vote on a bill from fellow Republican John Kennedy of Louisiana that would lift restrictions on money already appropriated for state aid, allowing the states to use that money for general operating expenses. That is of great interest to leaders in certain mostly Democratic-run states such as California, New York, and Illinois (and Kentucky), which have hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities for government workers’ pension plans. The total unfunded pension liability for the states is estimated at $1.5 trillion.

“Pensions are driving a lot of this,” Senator Scott says. “[States] don’t want to raise taxes. They don’t want to make tough choices. Businesses have to do it. You have to. Families have to watch their budgets — but not the states.”

Governor Cuomo, for his part, has attempted to resurrect the old canard about the so-called blue states subsidizing the red ones, as measured by tax receipts vs. federal expenditures. “They’re not bailing us out,” Cuomo said of Florida and Rick Scott. “We bail them out every year.”

This is a cherished Democratic talking point, but it is not quite true.

The largest per-capita net-recipient states at the moment are Democratic states: Virginia, Kentucky, and New Mexico. The biggest “donor” states are Democratic, too: Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. (NB: Estimates vary some from source to source, but New York is reliably pretty high on the purported net-payers’ list.) Some of those numbers are driven by entitlements and by the fact that the U.S. tax code is steeply progressive, i.e. by Democratic policies. And some of those numbers are driven by the fact that federal purchases, federal contracts, federal employees (hello, Virginia!), and federal lands are not evenly distributed throughout the country, which means that federal outlays do not land equally on every square inch of American territory — the federal government owns 85 percent of the land in Nevada but less than 1 percent of the land in New York State. There are a lot of financial firms in New York City and not very many Air Force bases, which affects the notional balance of payments.

The same dynamic is a big part of why Democratic states such as Maryland and Hawaii are on the net-takers’ list while Republican states such as North Dakota are net payers. California, once a donor state, is at the moment a modest recipient state, to the tune of about $12 a year per capita.

Again, it’s a dumb talking point, but this is Andrew Cuomo we’re dealing with. And if New York keeps sending the Carl Icahns of the world to Florida, it’ll end up being a net-recipient state, too, much to the delight of Florida. Governor Cuomo had better be careful what he wishes for.

(Another fun way of looking at this is that, because of our very progressive tax code, so-called donor states tend to have very high levels of the “income inequality” that keeps progressives up at night. In fact, 100 percent of U.S. income inequality can be attributed to California, Connecticut, Louisiana, New York, and the District of Columbia—every other state has a Gini coefficient lower than the national average. The most egalitarian state in the country? Utah. But Utah is way down at No. 42 in per-capita income . . . and in the top tier, at No. 13, in household income. It’s complicated. Utah’s median family income is about the same as California’s, those being $65,997 and $67,739, respectively. California has a median per-capita income lower than that of North Dakota, Minnesota, Colorado, or Delaware, but those Silicon Valley guys pay a lot in taxes.)

Governor Cuomo’s administration is not spending its money bailing out Florida. It’s spending it on government unions and welfare, and on an increasingly dysfunctional New York City transit system for which a new mile of track or a new station costs five times (or more) as much as the same work does in London, Paris, or Madrid.

As Chris Edwards at Cato points out, New York and Florida have about the same number of kids in school, but New York spends far more on its highly unionized public-school workforce, shelling out $69 billion in 2017 to Florida’s 28 billion. U.S. News and World Report ranks New York and Florida about the same when it comes to preK-12 education, right in the middle of the pack at 25 and 27, respectively. (It ranks Florida No. 1 in higher education and New York No. 15.) Edwards finds that New York spends two and a half times what Florida spends on welfare, even though the Empire State has a higher median household income. New York’s government workforce is much larger than Florida’s (1,196,632 vs. 889,950), and as Edwards notes, “New York spends vastly more on employee retirement than Florida.”

Rick Scott likes to boast that Florida’s government debt was reduced by $10 billion on his watch and that Moody’s upped its credit rating to AAA. Less debt and better credit mean less money spent on interest payments. New York carries more debt than Florida does, and does not share that AAA rating. That takes an additional $10 billion a year out of New Yorkers’ pockets compared to Floridians’ interest-payment burden.

Senator Scott doesn’t want to see federal bailout money going to state governments, he says, because of the “complete disregard for the people who pay the taxes.” Beyond the pension shenanigans, just writing a blank check to state governments allows Democrats in effect to shift state liabilities onto the federal government and pursue their own parochial short-term political interests. “If we do the bailouts, we’re funding the pension plans,” Senator Scott says. “If we do the bailouts, we’re funding Planned Parenthood.” He’d rather see money go to unemployment benefits and to more focused counter-epidemic programs, especially testing.

“The right thing to do is to solve the problems. Do the testing. If people have lost their jobs, help the unemployed. Help the small businesses that have been hit.” He says the Paycheck Protection Program needs to be “cleaned up” — he wants businesses to prove they’ve suffered substantial revenue losses before Washington starts picking up their expenses — and says he is worried about the rate at which the federal government is accumulating debt and the interest-rate risk that brings. “We haven’t fixed any of the programs,” he says. “Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, Social Security — none of them is fully funded.”

Instead, he says, we have leaned on deficit financing. And that means, at some point, a day of reckoning.

“Somebody, eventually, has to write the check.”