
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 23, 1994                   TAG: 9411230099
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE NEW FEDERALISM

GOP governors, including Virginia's George Allen, didn't conspicuously wave red flags prior to the election, when House Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich and fellow Republicans drafted their Contract With America, promising to push for a balanced-budget amendment, take a cleaver to federal spending, enact welfare reform and reduce taxes - all while protecting Social Security and military expenditures.

But the Republican governors and governors-elect, who gathered this week in Williamsburg, have now read the fine print. And they are getting antsy that federal spending cuts may fall, along with new responsibilities, on their doorsteps. With remarkably hot rhetoric, Allen & Co. are shouting across the Potomac: No more shift and shaft.

The governors, Republican and Democrat alike, have cause for concern. Aid to state and local governments represents about a third of domestic spending, if Social Security isn't included. It will be nigh impossible for congressional Republicans to meet the key economic terms of their contract - balanced budget, spending cuts and tax cuts - without slashing away at aid to states and localities. Efforts to shrink the federal role, especially in welfare and health spending, will swell the burdens of lower tiers of government.

And because states, unlike the federal government currently, must operate on balanced budgets, sharp cuts in federal aid may force governors to raise taxes - something that many, Republicans particularly, have forsworn in their own contracts with voters.

No wonder, then, that GOP governors want to amend the Gingrich program to include a new focus on federalism and states' rights, and are threatening to oppose the GOP-controlled Congress if it continues to run roughshod over statehouses.

The governors want an end to unfunded federal mandates. They want freedom to design their own welfare-reform programs, fashion their own environmental protection, without having to fall in line with Washington's one-size-fits-all edicts. They want Washington to get out of their way.

They make a good point. States and localities often are more creative than the federal government, and by definition are closer to varying local circumstances. In more instances, the feds should set national standards and allow localities to achieve them any way they wish.

State and local governments ought to be research laboratories working out diverse solutions to problems free from the suffocating command and control of federal bureaucrats. Health-care reform and welfare reform present two opportunities for doing just that.

Governors and their constituents cannot, however, demand hands off from Washington with no disruption in the flow of funds. Nor should they expect a reassertion of states' rights at the expense of fundamental standards of decency, constitutional protections for all citizens, or Americans' shared sense of nationhood.

Perhaps carried away by their oratory (Allen compared Washington to the "arrogant, overbearing monarchy across the sea," against which Virginians and others revolted two centuries ago), the governors have gone way too far in one of their proposals. They call for a constitutional amendment to allow three-fourths of the states to override federal laws they don't like.

The idea evokes chilling reminders of massive resistance to school integration orders in the '50s, when federal intrusion into state affairs was also the issue.

Thanks, but no thanks. The governors' push for a new state-federal relationship is reasonable, but it must be achieved without dismantling the Constitution.

by CNB