Reagan, states rights and the withering of the U.S.

[wilt the stilt]

I think when history is finally understood we will see that Reagan and the republicans are central to the breakdown of the nation as a united country. Since Reagan really started the states right movement we have seen the breakdown of the U.S. as a single entity. A strong federal government is needed to have us be one and all pulling in the same direction. Now we have a divided country with 50 fiefdoms. There is nothing uniting us. We experimented with a weak central government before and it was called the Articles of Confederation.

Finally, can anyone explain why the administration of voting is not a federal function. It is a right and not a privilege and it's my belief that anything that is guaranteed in the constitution should be administered by the federal government. We have a history of abuse by the states.

[CurtEastPoint]

1. I have long thought the same thing...that voting should be a FEDERALLY controlled function.

We are AMERICANS, regardless of which stupid state we live in.

[SickOfTheOnePct]

2. The Constitution leaves the administration of elections to the states

Because they are 50 separate, sovereign entities joined together by the Constitution. Rightly or wrongly, the Founders didn't favor a strong federal government.

[Jackpine Radical]

4. They also lived in an age before mass culture and mass communications.

The world is somewhat different now.

[SickOfTheOnePct]

6. Agree

Just stating that it is what it is, and the only way around some of these things are Constitutional amendments, which would be next to impossible to pass.

[BlindTiresias]

3. I think the US is losing its geographic advantage

It is easy to be the strongest player in town when you have a whole (violently evicted) continent to work from and are flanked by two oceans, it is even easier when the rest of the developed world blows themselves to bits twice over while you remain untouched. Now that the rest of the world has developed and are reaching parity with us or will reach parity by the end of the century we are seeing the American system wasn't all it was cracked up to be and we were enjoying substantial advantages not derived from our form of government, no matter how magical many of us think it is.

[raging moderate]

5. Wilt the Stilt was right. Our current Constitution favored a strong Federal government.

That is OUR government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

We already tried it the other way, with loosely affiliated little separate states. The first national agreement was called the Articles of Confederation. The southern states preferred the earlier version (although this didn't stop them from continually trying to draft the rest of us to be their assistant thugs to help them recapture any of their victims who escaped their clutches). That is why they called their Southern union the Confederacy.

[Caretha]

7. Thank you

for setting the record straight.