States rights in this country got off to a bad start and then went downhill.
Originally, the deal was that since the states invented the federal government in order to set up a system of unified defense against the world (we were surrounded by Britain, France, Spain, and Indian Tribes), protect property (in slaves, land, and commercial paper), regulate commerce among the states, tribes, and foreign nations, tax and spend for the general welfare, maintain a navy, and, when necessary, an army, the states should be left alone to run just about everything else.
"Everything else" was called the "police power," that is the power to regulate public health, safety, welfare, and morals. These would include the criminal law, drug laws, health and safety laws, probate and estate laws, family law, business and corporation law, and everything else you see in the state codes when you look in a law library.
States rights got off to a bad start when Jefferson and Madison, two of our founding daddies, secretly wrote up the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions to combat Adams's evil Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Authorship had to remain secret because what they wrote was that the states could disapprove of, ignore, and override (nullify) acts of Congress. This way lies secession, as the South eventually insisted when eleven slave states (of fifteen) seceded. Of course the North also met (in Hartford, Connecticut) in order to secede also, over Madison's embargo of Britain, which was killing New Enland merchants and shipping interests. All in the name of states rights vs. federal.
States rights, in the run-up to the bloody Civil War (600,000 killed) was code for slavery. Since slavery was legal, the South could point its finger legalistically to the Constitution, which allowed slavery and left the finer points of its regulation to the states. The South had a point, legally. The North pointed to a higher law of morality and Christianity to decry the Southern insistence that slavery is legal and if you don't like it, we're splitting, just as Madison and Jefferson said we could back in Virginia and Kentucky in 1798, so what are you going to do about that?
Lincoln said we'll have to do whatever it takes and this meant war, which broke out as soon as he won the 1860 election, the South getting in the first shot, at Ft. Sumter.
After the war, won by the North, there was little talk of states rights for a long time as the newly reconstituted Union tried to pull itself back together over the long haul, minus the slavery. States rights was a discredited doctrine, along with slavery, nullification, secession, and the like.
The nation had more pressing problems, in the 20th century, such as WWI, WWII, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf Wars.
But then peace broke out, more or less, in which international hot and cold wars were joined by a culture war at home ever since the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s.
Suddenly the Christian Right began to pull itself together to form the Moral Majority, which came after Nixon's Silent Majority. The Christian Right, led by Jerry Falwell, among others, was primarily a South-inspired and located movement identified with Southern Baptists and other South leaning Christian groups throughout the Bible Belt. They helped in a big way to put Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and now George W. Bush in the White House by stressing Christian fundamentalist values which decry rights for homosexuals such as to engage in sex and marry. This demographic also opposes the Constitutional right of a woman to have an abortion, especially younger women. It wasn't in the forefront of civil rights for African-Americans either.
The reason states rights comes up now is because it seems suddenly to have been abandoned by its most ardent devotees in the Schiavo case.
In Schiavo case, a Florida state court judge ruled that the tube could be pulled that was keeping Terri Schiavo alive.
The Christian Right (read the Republican party) i.e., the GOP has suddenly found its insistence that certain things should be left to the states, most inconvenient. The GOP-Right wants to determine the outcome of the Schiavo case in favor of re-inserting the tube, which means she remains in a permanent vegetative state. This is despite the Florida court ruling. States rightists normally prefer state court decisionmaking to federal in such matters, believing them to be proper only for a state to make, not Uncle Sam.
After all, they reason, we're better off having local officials decide local concerns than having those idiot bureaucrats in Washington who don't know anything about local concerns. Like Congress and the President who is supposed to be thinking about bringing home the troops in Iraq (1,500 killed so far) instead of feeding tubes in Florida.
Family, probate, and general civil law issues are, traditionally, matters of state law.
In a case like Schiavo issues such as who has priority to make decisions for Terri, her husband or her parents, whether her tube may be pulled and on what evidence, by what authority, are all governed by state law.
The subject of living wills, advance health care directives (AHCD), claims of right to refuse medical care, physician-assisted suicide, and tube-pulling, as in Schiavo, are normally matters of state control.
But at Midnight on Palm Sunday, the week before Easter Sunday, Congress and the President weighed in with a special emergency law, good for this one case only, Schiavo. Congress and the President, meaning the Republican Right, the Christian Right, were stepping onto the scales of justice, trying to tip the balance away from Judge Greer's decision. He's the Florida state court judge who heard the evidence and ruled that Michael has final say as guardian of Terri, not her parents. Michael
says Terri would've wanted the tube pulled, despite what her parents may claim.
The Christian right finds this hugely objectionable. We are the "culture of life," they proclaim. We are against abortion. We think that all fetuses are the equivalent of full human life. Fetuses cannot be destroyed, nor can adults, no matter how disabled. Otherwise we'd have to kill people wearing band-aids, because we're incapable of making distinctions between cases like grown-ups.
In short, now that the South has ve seen states rights in action, they don't like it, now, any more than the North did, then.
So they've abandoned states rights in favor of federal control. A federal judge appointed by a president and Senate sitting in Washington, is supposedly in a better position than Judge Greer to decide which family member controls Terri Schiavo's fate. She's been unconscious for fifteen years.
When jurisdiction was thus handed to USDJ Whittemore (Middle District of Florida), he upheld Judge Greer's decisionmaking. Trips up and down the federal appellate monkey-bars have changed not a whit. Terri Schiavo remains untubed and dying, despite all the demonstrating and posturing by politicians and family members and clergy. Jesse Jackson showed up, in time to catch at least one news cycle, as he usually does.
It's very nice that everyone feels compassionate over the sick and the dying, and their families, but what happened to states rights? It flew out the window at the sound of the first shot.
We can forget about states rights now, it having been abandoned and shown to be a sick joke, now that the Republicans and the Christian Right have decided to screw (ignore, interfere with) the states in the name of a Higher Morality.
Now it's the North which is being legalistic, while the South points to God's law. God condemns tube-pulling. Even the Catholic Pope, in his eighties is being fed by a tube now. Arch-conservative Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, in his eighties and fighting throat cancer, has also been forced, at times recently, to rely on a ventilation tube.
The LA Times has this editorial noting the change here, reprinted below, referring to former GOP Sen. John Danforth's reference to the Christian Right hijacking the GOP: