Summary
Devins comments on an article by John McGinnis and Ilya Somin about the distributional model of federalism. He claims that McGinnis and Somin are wrong in suggesting that informed voters would likely value federalism over other objectives, and consequently, that the problem with the political process policing federalism is that Americans are "know nothings" who have little incentive to learn about, let alone monitor the federal state balance.
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Extract
The Judicial Safeguards of Federalism
I. INTRODUCTION
There is no federalism constituency within Congress. Not only do federal lawmakers and national lobbyists gladly sacrifice federalism in order to advance other interests, but state officials also "have systematic political interests that often cause them to undermine federalism."1 In explaining why both state and federal officials discount federalism, John McGinnis and Ilya Somin's Federalism vs. States' Rights: A Defense of Judicial Review in a Federal System provides an important and persuasive critique of the claim that the national political process inevitably protects federalism.2My comments will extend Federalism v. States Rights in two ways. First, I will posit an alternative explanation as to why the national political process does not value structural federalism. In particular, I will argue that even if the American people were well informed about the benefits of federalism, they would still trade off those benefits in order to secure other policy objectives. For this reason, I think McGinnis and Somin are wrong in suggesting that informed voters would likely value federalism over other objectives and, consequently, that the problem with the political process policing federalism is that Americans are "know nothings" who have little incentive to learn about, let alone "monitor[,] the federal state balance."3 As I will argue in section II of this Comment, there is no reason to believe that the problem with federalism is that the principals (the American voters...See the full content of this document
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