Trump has said he’s going to do a bunch of crazy stuff–stuff that many states will find unacceptable or contrary to their interests.
For instance, Trump promises to dismantle many environmental regulations. Presumably, some of these will apply to vehicles. Fortunately for me, I live in California, where CARB regulations exceed Federal EPA standards (some other states also abide by CARB standards). It seems unlikely that Trump can somehow ban CARB, so whatever Trump does it won’t have an effect on autos here. Will more states join in?
Or take the ACA. It’s not clear how exactly it will be dismantled, but I have to imagine that some states will want their own replacement. Will any adopt the ACA framework as-is, just without the Federal component? Will this spur any states to go single-payer?
Another one:
California also has its own greenhouse gas program and it generally seems to work well. Some northeast states also have a CO2 cap and trade program for their energy sector. These programs obviously exceed what the feds mandate–but if more regulations are cut, will that spur more states join in?
Trump was clearly elected, in part, on a “fuck it, let’s try something new” mentality. But that doesn’t mean that states where he won are onboard with all of his proposals, especially given their vagueness. So I can imagine that states will implement their own solutions on lots of stuff.
As another example, gay marriage was already legal in 37 states before Obergefell v. Hodges–presumably, even in the event that the result is overturned, states will simply fall back to existing law. And frankly, I’d expect that many of the remaining ones would follow suit, given that bastions of liberalism like Wyoming and West Virginia had already allowed it.
I don’t think Obergefell is going to be overturned, but if it was, it would take a lot of those 37 states with it, at least temporarily. West Virginia and Wyoming only allowed it because a federal court ordered them to. If the Obergefell case had gone the other way, same-sex marriage would have ended in West Virginia and Wyoming.
Interesting. Yeah, I see that the Fourth Circuit court basically set precedent for a bunch of states, and that overturning Obergefell would allow those states to reinstate their statutory bans. I wonder how many states would remain after that.
Obergefell certainly isn’t going to be overturned in the short term, given that Scalia was one of the dissenters, though who knows what’ll happen later on.
The states can pretty much do what they want in our system, especially under Republican rule. Liberal states can happily govern themselves under liberal policies. They just can’t make Utah adopt liberal policies.
It’s not quite as simple as that in all cases. For instance, CARB (California Air Resources Board) is the only non-Federal clean air agency allowed. It got grandfathered in because it came in before the Clean Air Act. Other states can follow CARB or the Federal standards, but can’t just make up their own thing. Right now there are 14 “CARB states”. If the EPA is weakened, more states might conceivably join in.
Yes, there are some limits because of the interstate commerce clause, but it’s hard to think of very many critical things, things that are vitally important to the people of California, that they aren’t already allowed to do. They can have whatever minimum wage they want, recognize any marriages they want, have restrictive gun laws(within Heller limits). There’s very little that any state can get from being independent that they don’t already have, unless the federal government has ambitions of ordering the states around, which GOP administrations generally try to avoid doing, although they can be hypocrites when powerful donors are involved.