Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[T]here is an interesting lesson to be learned from the great GMO debate between the state of Vermont on one side and the combined forces of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the Agribusiness establishment and the Republican Party on the other.
The lesson has nothing to do with the merits of the case, with whether eating food made from genetically modified organisms will make you sick (it will not) or whether the GMO process is bad for the environment (it might be).
Nor does it have anything to do with what Gov. Peter Shumlin called “Vermonters’ right to know what is in their food,” though perhaps they should have that right, or with the possible (if rather unlikely) increase in the price of food if producers have to label products containing GMOs. Food companies change labels quite frequently. It’s called marketing.
This lesson is strictly political, and can be succinctly expressed: beware of the process fraud.
Politicians, lobbyists and their acolytes in the media and in academia love to talk about process. It makes them seem like intellectuals, as though they are philosophers motivated by principle.
So they debate whether decisions should be made on the state or the federal level; by the legislature, by voter referendum, or perhaps through the courts; by majority rule or by consensus; by the many or by the few who really understand the problem.
Pay no attention to such chitchat. They don’t mean it. Even those who sincerely think they mean it don’t mean it. If they meant it, they’d act as though they meant it. They do not.
Consider this GMO fracas. In May 2014, the Vermont Legislature passed and Shumlin signed a law requiring that labels on many food products state that they are – or even that they “may be” – “produced with genetic engineering.”
Thus enraging the Republican Party, or at least its members of Congress, who immediately set out to scuttle Vermont’s law by passing a federal law that would eviscerate (“preempt” is the legal term) state laws requiring such labels.
“We have to have the (U.S. Agriculture Department) have a label that is standard for everybody,” said the bill’s Senate sponsor, Pat Roberts of Kansas.
That’s not a frivolous argument. But take a look at who Pat Roberts is. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1980 and immediately joined Georgia Rep. (and later House Speaker) Newt Gingrich’s rebellious back-benchers.
Nothing was more central to what later became known as “the Gingrich revolution” than the belief in “devolving” power from the federal government to the states and even localities, to “government closest to the people.”
“We are committed to getting power back to the states,” Gingrich said, “and we believe you can trust the 50 states and the 50 state legislatures to work together on behalf of the citizens of their states.”
This was the New Federalism. Actually, it was the third New Federalism, making it perhaps the New New New Federalism, after Richard Nixon’s version in 1969 and Ronald Reagan’s in 1981.
In all three cases, it might have more accurately been called anti-federalism. The original federalists – George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and the boys – got their name because they wanted a larger and more powerful federal government.
Their opponents – Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and their boys – wanted a weaker federal government.
Until they took charge of it. Then Jefferson arranged to double the size of the nation by buying the Louisiana Territory from France, perhaps the most sweeping exercise of federal power until the Emancipation Proclamation.
And it might be worth remembering that both the Louisiana Purchase and the Emancipation Proclamation were good ideas.
The process fraud, in other words, is not new. Politicians and their hangers-on do not care and never have cared how decisions are made. They care only about the actual decision – about whether it establishes the policy that they (and their campaign donors) prefer.
Thus one of the major accomplishments of the Gingrich “devoluters” was an act of counter-devolution. For a couple of hundred years, the states had capably handled the institution of marriage. But no sooner did some states flirt with the idea of same-sex marriage than the Gingrichites – by then in the majority – decided to preempt by passing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman and allowing states to refuse to recognize any other kind which another state might approve.
DOMA was struck down as unconstitutional in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which found it “a deprivation of the liberty of the person protected by the Fifth Amendment.”
Of late, the same office-holders who most avidly support decision-making by “government closest to the people” have been busy on the state level reversing decisions made by local governments, who are presumably closest to the people. When the citizens of Denton, Texas, voted to ban hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in their town, the state legislature promptly passed a law granting the state “the exclusive jurisdiction … to regulate oil and gas operations.”
And just the other day, the North Carolina legislature – in response to a Charlotte ordinance granting equal rights in public accommodations to homosexuals and transgendered people – passed a law forbidding any local ordinances concerning wages, employment and public accommodations.
Both legislatures had the right to do what they did. One can argue that what they did was good policy. One cannot argue that those lawmakers deferred to “government closest to the people.”
One can also dispute the wisdom – or, come to think of it – the importance – of Vermont’s GMO labeling law. But it was the overwhelming decision of the Legislature (99-to-44 in the House of Representatives, 28-to-2 in the Senate), who in this case were clearly reflecting the wishes of their constituents as reflected in public opinion polls.
Politicians who are serious about trusting “the 50 states and the 50 state legislatures to work together on behalf of the citizens of their states” would not try to overturn that law – as they have the right to do – by interjecting the federal government’s “supreme law of the land power.” But they did try (and fail, at least for now; on March 18 the Senate declined to take up the bill). That’s because they are not serious about trusting the states when the states want to do something the federal lawmakers do not like.
When politicians and their cheerleaders talk about governing principles, remember that it isn’t the principles they care about. It’s the interest.
