Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is upset because the federal government has decided that certain drugs should not be available to doctors who are treating patients with COVID-19.
In response to this decision, the Florida Department of Health is shutting down clinics that have been using these drugs to treat patients.
His solution? To demand that the federal government reverse the decision. Or more accurately, to beg for permission from the federal government to do something that — according to the written Constitution — doesn’t require any such permission.
One of the silver linings to the federal government’s lurching, spastic overreaction to COVID-19 is that it’s creating opportunities left and right for individual states to dust off their copies of the written Constitution; check Article 1, Section 8 for the list of things that the states allow the federal government to handle; and get back to the business of handling everything else — which is to say, nearly everything — as sovereign states.
Over the centuries, the states have allowed the architecture of their Constitution to be flipped on its head. The states created the federal government, and the states delegated a very limited set of powers to it; but gradually, those same states have grown accustomed to the idea that they aren’t sovereign states at all, but really colonies; that they must do whatever their own creation tells them to do.
It’s a little like hiring a gardener, and then letting him start making financial, educational, and medical decisions for your family — as if you work for him, rather than the other way around.
Governor DeSantis has an opportunity here to say to the federal government: You don’t have the power to deny the State of Florida anything where medical care is concerned. And if you decide to start withholding Medicare and Medicaid payments to try to force us into compliance, we’ll start escrowing federal income taxes within Florida, and taking those payments from escrow.
(Honestly, every governor has this same opportunity. I’m just singling out DeSantis because he seems like someone who might actually cash in on it.)
Would other states follow Florida’s lead? Some would. More importantly, other states might take similar initiatives in other policy areas, where Article 1, Section 8, along with the 9th and 10th Amendments, all make it clear that in almost every area of life, the role of the federal government is to butt out.
As my friend Carla Gericke likes to say: It’s time to make America states again. Ron DeSantis has an opportunity to get that ball rolling. But will he take it?
