By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Maybe you can find a museum exhibit explaining the slightly remembered concept of federalism, unless it’s concealed like pornography under the counter, to avoid giving people bad ideas.
Federalism was the founding philosophy that the individual states of the United States were free to go their own ways, discrete experiments in self-rule, subject to the limited demands of unity in one great, big country.
That’s why, as one explanation of federalism says, each state has its own constitution.
Poor federalism is dead, killed at the hands of centralizers, political power-grabbers, judicial over-steppers, and know-it-alls who define liberalism as the power to run everything for their own actual benefit and everyone else’s theoretical, but not actual, betterment.
In some ways, 21st century technology might mean this modern U.S. of more than 320 million people should work more smoothly than the original 13 states along the stagecoach-connected 18th century Eastern coast.
However, anyone staggering through TSA airport screening lines in mid-May before eventually being strapped in to skim through the upper atmosphere in a jet-powered big cylinder knows the limits to ambition and control.
And when the overwhelming, overweening Obama government thinks it can get away with suddenly mandating the intrusion of sex predators into lavatories from sea to sulking sea, the latest of Obama’s strong-arm exercises in a developing dictatorship, we’re past the breaking point.
The wisdom of the Founders favoring federalism was apparent to a much smaller nation in population and area. Even if today’s burning issues of national leftists commanding immorality for everyone didn’t exist, it seems likelier that a nation as big as the U.S. would be a happier, more cooperative land if federalism were restored and states’ sovereignty meant something serious again.
It would be real diversity in action, instead of today’s phony “diversity” that means leftists define how everyone else is allowed to think — and breathe and eat.
There’s no perfect human past, present or future this side of endless Heaven, but federalism helps minimize mammoth mistakes.
Want to go boating on your river? Plant crops on your ranch? Plant your feet in a government park? All too likely you need permission not merely or only from the county or state capital, but from the fierce federal beast on the Potomac.
If this suffocates you, fine; the federal government has imported illegal aliens more than ready to replace your husk. Cremation, by the way, is the environmentalists’ preferred way that deceased you and your family do not waste acreage. Wait until D.C. mandates that!
Republican Cong. Paul Gosar (gosar.house.gov), a conservative Catholic and dentist, represents Arizona’s Fourth District, much rural land and the Grand Canyon State’s “West Coast” from Utah to Yuma, along the Colorado River fronting California and Nevada.
Among many menu items on his congressional table, Gosar has been fighting the federal Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan “to close significant portions of Lake Havasu to motorized boating activities.” The lake is a major recreational area on that Colorado River “coast.” Lake Havasu City’s economy significantly is tied to the water.
Gosar asserts, “Keep Lake Havasu open for all users.”
Obama himself is dangerous problem enough for the U.S., but even without him, look at just this one example of many of obnoxious federal puissance. Obama renames mountains and unmakes morality, but Fish and Wildlife, the EPA, and all their alphabet brothers, sisters, and sex-uncertain siblings make their continent-wide mischief during bright day, dark night, and whatever the grayish other hours of the 24 identify themselves as.
These are all offshoots under the new rainbow umbrella of the Federal Department of Hubris, Unction, and Posturing (FED-HUP). (It’s sure to erect its D.C. headquarters without congressional authorization.)
On May 10 Gosar’s office issued a news release saying he had just found out through a news site that Fish and Wildlife would extend a public-comment period on Lake Havasu changes by only 30 days, not the 60 days requested by 21 congressmen as well as agencies including the Arizona Game and Fish Department, the Lake Havasu Marine Association, and the Mohave County Board of Supervisors.
At issue is the “draft recreational boating Compatibility Determination (CD) for Havasu National Wildlife Refuge.”
Gosar said in the news release: “Even after more than 1,000 passionate citizens showed up last week in Lake Havasu City in opposition to unjustified boating restrictions, the Service continues to blatantly ignore the will of the people. This type of tone-deaf bureaucratic behavior has built an unprecedented level of distrust and frustration between the federal government and the American people.
“Furthermore, it is unbelievable that my staff and I had to find out about this shortened extension through a news report, especially as we just reached out to the Service yesterday to see if there were any updates,” Gosar said.
“Based on what I witnessed at the public meeting in Lake Havasu City, the agency should have scrapped this terrible proposal and went back to the drawing board,” he said. “Instead the Service appears hell-bent on forcing unwarranted boating restrictions down the throats of local stakeholders. If the Service really cared ‘about soliciting public input from all users,’ then it would have met these users’ request and extended the comment period an additional 60 days.
“I will continue to do everything in my power to fight these misguided boating restrictions that are not based on science. Service officials can hide behind the curtain when it comes to public scrutiny, but they can’t hide from me,” he said.
Whatever the outcome to such battles, no one doubts that the issue of national defense is a federal responsibility. Yet even here, given the atmosphere of chaos and lawlessness that Obama and his leftists create, shocking changes can get shoved through by less liberal sources.
The Conservative Review site reported on May 12, “John McCain slips in provision to draft women in defense bill.”
“Moderate” McCain, the senior Republican U.S. senator from Arizona, and other GOP congressional members, not only have “refused to use their perches on the Armed Services committees in the House and Senate to block this (Obama) social engineering, they are now codifying it with a provision that could lead to a mandatory draft of all women,” said the Conservative Review article by Daniel Horowitz.
McCain is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a position he can thank conservatives for after their activism returned upper-chamber control to the GOP in the 2014 elections.
“Any vestige of GOP opposition to Democrat social transformation is now gone,” Horowitz continued. “. . . Battle lines that used to hold for decades are now plowed through by Democrats in a matter of one committee markup. A party that stands for nothing, indeed.
“A summary of the (National Defense Authorization Act) from McCain’s office defends the provision to include women in Selective Service as follows: ‘Because the Department of Defense has lifted the ban on women serving in ground combat units, the committee believes there is no further justification in limiting the duty to register under the Military Selective Service Act to men’,” Horowitz wrote.
“Thus, McCain believes that because a few liberal social groups and Obama’s politically appointed generals want to include women in combat on a voluntary basis, the Senate should therefore require all women to potentially register for the draft. And instead of debating this earth-shattering social transformation publicly in a stand-alone bill, McCain decided to slip in the provision to a 1,000-page bill authorizing all defense programs,” Horowitz wrote.
The Wanderer called the Conservative Review article to the attention of McCain’s media office on May 16, asking for reaction. The response provided to this newspaper later that day from McCain said:
“As women serve in more roles across the armed forces, I support the recommendation of each uniformed chief of the services that women should register for Selective Service. It is the logical conclusion of the decision to open combat positions to women.”
Ideological Extremism
Family-practice physician and former Arizona State Sen. Kelli Ward, from Lake Havasu City, is McCain’s main opponent for the GOP Senate nomination in Arizona’s August 30 primary election. McCain is nearing the end of his fifth six-year Senate term.
A media spokesman for Ward told The Wanderer: “Sen. Ward is opposed to mandatory selective service for women, an issue that should be robustly and transparently debated in front of the American people, not sneakily buried in a bill to pay American troops.”
Ward, a military wife and mother of three, including one daughter, provided the following statement to this newspaper:
“Drafting our daughters deep down in a massive bill that includes troop funding is exactly the cowardly, underhanded shenanigans that ordinary Americans hate about John McCain’s Washington.
“I agree with Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Phyllis Schlafly that drafting our daughters is ill-informed, idiotic, immoral, and absurd,” she said. “While voluntary service is one thing, I will not let D.C. drag our daughters at gunpoint onto the battlefield. Extremist social-engineering schemes from ivory-tower academics and bitter feminists have no place in our armed forces.
“It’s sad to see John McCain once again caving in to political correctness and left-wing ideological extremism, this time at the expense of our military effectiveness and national security,” Ward said.
Update: At last report, the House was expected not to let that Senate provision move forward.
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