Refighting Old Battles

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) speaks lovingly of child labor. Or at least, the alleged right of the individual states to regulate child labor, as opposed to the Federal Government:

Congress decided it wanted to prohibit [child labor], so it passed a law—no more child labor. The Supreme Court heard a challenge to that and the Supreme Court decided a case in 1918 called Hammer v. Dagenhardt. In that case, the Supreme Court acknowledged something very interesting — that, as reprehensible as child labor is, and as much as it ought to be abandoned — that’s something that has to be done by state legislators, not by Members of Congress. [...]

This may sound harsh, but it was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh. Not because we like harshness for the sake of harshness, but because we like a clean division of power, so that everybody understands whose job it is to regulate what.

Now, we got rid of child labor, notwithstanding this case. So the entire world did not implode as a result of that ruling.

Actually, the Federal government got rid of child labor, in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Hammer in United States v. Darby:

The conclusion is inescapable that Hammer v. Dagenhart was a departure from the principles which have prevailed in the interpretation of the Commerce Clause both [p117] before and since the decision, and that such vitality, as a precedent, as it then had, has long since been exhausted. It should be, and now is, overruled.

Unanimously.

Lee's plaint about the power of the states vs. the Federal government is of the same piece as the "States Rights" movement of the '50s and '60s (continued into the '80s). As Digby puts it, "These people don't believe that America is a country. They don't believe that it is an American value, across all state lines and across all political divisions to ensure that children are not exploited." But that's what Republicans (and Teabaggers are Republicans, after all) do - they exploit. An, like every other example of the victimization of people, they will believe that the victims themselves are to blame, through some moral fault.

Actually, it's worse. These people are stuck in the 18th Century, when it was OK and safe to think of the individual states as states, in the sense of different countries. They really would prefer to give the states far more power at the expense of the Federal government. In doing so, however, they would legally and economically balkanize the country into a collection of little fiefdoms, where they could exploit people without interference. At the root, what they are arguing for is weakening the United States of America. They think less like Americans than most people do, and they would be willing to pull this country down to satisfy their petty notions of what the Federal government ought and ought not be able to do.

(If they really wanted a "clean division of power," they should have the states cede all powers to the Federal government, and have the Federal government delegate that power back to them, retaining supremacy. The states already handle power vs. counties and local municipalities in this manner; those powers are derivative of, and subject to, the power of the State. No question about divisional of power.)

Their line of thinking was rejected politically when the Articles of Confederation were ditched in favor of the Constitution. It was rejected militarily in the Civil War. It was rejected economically in the New Deal. And it was rejected socially during the Civil Rights movement.

Why are we going to have to fight this battle again?