STEPHEN MOORE: Blue State Governors Suddenly Yearn For Federalism

I argued for many months before the election that regardless of the outcome, nearly half of Americans would be very unhappy.

My point was that the only way we can “all get along” as a country given our deep ideological divisions is by devolving power out of Washington and back to the states and letting them decide policy.

Education, environment, climate change, labor issues, abortion, tax levels and welfare benefits should all be policies left to the 50 states. These should all be state issues not federal issues. You won’t find the words education or energy policy in the United States Constitution. That was no oversight by our Founding Fathers. They believed these issues resided with the “states and the people.”

Well, lo and behold, Donald Trump won and blue state governors are demanding that Washington leave them alone.

Democratic governors are lobbying for the feds to leave their states alone. You may have seen that Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York are organizing resistance campaigns against Trump policies.

They want to set their own labor and climate change policies and not be poked by the Trump administration. If Republicans are true constitutionalists, they should let the blue states dictate their own policies.

One problem is that the Democratic governors want to have power over one of the few powers that does legitimately rest with the federal government — immigration policy. States can’t make up their own policies on who to let into the country. They can’t harbor criminal aliens who have entered the nation illegally.

But on most other issues, if blue states want to opt out of federal directives, great. There are way too many federal laws interfering with state sovereignty.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he’s worried about the incoming Trump administration trying to roll back clean-energy measures and abortion rights. “The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle,” Newsom promised.

Welcome to our world over the past four years when President Joe Biden put a stranglehold on red states.

I hope President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress let blue states and blue-state voters set their own policies. If they want to raise taxes, install costly green energy mandates, force their residents to buy electric vehicles and let hardened criminals out on the streets where they live, that is their prerogative.

Trump is threatening to counter state resistance to his federal policies by withholding federal dollars. That is a bad response. The better one is to leave them alone.

Blue states have much higher taxes, much more union controls over their labor force and impose more onerous regulations on their citizens. They are teaching the rest of the nation a valuable lesson: These policies lead to disastrous consequences. There is a reason that in recent years Americans left California, New Jersey and New York. Americans from other states are learning the lessons of these policies the hard way.

This is the ingeniousness of the American system of federalism: residents can escape blue state tyranny by moving to red states. It is normally liberals who want one set of federal laws to rule over all the states. Now that they are not making the rules, they want relief.

This is one of the reasons that Washington must never fully bring back the state and local tax deduction. This only allowed blue states to export as much as one-third of their tax burdens on to the backs of residents of red states. Florida and Texas residents paying no state income tax should not have to bear the burden of the high California taxes.

Similarly, every state should be able to choose their own climate-change policies and their own forced union policies. If they want to shoot themselves in their own foot, people in Florida and Iowa and Utah should not prevent it.

Blue states should be permitted to remain in their cocoons of anti-growth progressivism. They have the right to be self-righteous and sacrificial.

In this way progressivism will die of its own devices. So, governors Pritzker and Newsom and Murphy and Whitmer, you go for it. Sprint to the progressive one-yard line.

Americans can then vote with their feet to embrace or escape blue-state tyranny. Millions of Americans will likely leave and it won’t be long before Texas is home to more people than California.

It’s a replay of the East Germany and West Germany experiment circa 2025. We know how that turned out.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.