By Daniel Nardini

I only go by the facts on the ground. Current U.S. President Donald Trump is the problem. Now he starts a trade war, then he puts it on pause. He puts on tariffs not approved by the U.S. Congress—which is the branch that has the authority to put on tariffs, and worse Trump has hit allies and friends as well as foes alike. This is the behavior of a man who is most likely demented, and probably psychologically insane. He ignores the lawful authority of the U.S. federal court system and the U.S. Supreme Court, and it seems that the U.S. Congress, by a slim margin controlled by the Republican Party, refuses to do its job as the legislative branch. The result is that allies and friends of the United States have lost trust in what the United States as a whole is doing, and this only diminishes America in the eyes of the world. Worse, it means that the federal government cannot do its job of making the country work as a whole.

What it all means is that for the individual U.S. states, they can either go along with the wacky and volatile shenanigans of Trump, or they can plot a more independent course of action. This is known as power devolution—taking the power away from the center (i.e. the federal government in Washington, D.C.) and put it into the hands administrators in the state capitals. When you think about it, states run just about everything we do from how we live our daily lives, when we go to work, how social services run, and the laws made to run the state governments. They help make things work, and the federal government simply takes the tax revenue from the blue (Democrat) states and distribute it to the red (Republican) states simply because the blue states generate way more capital than the red states. Perhaps the blue states should withhold the tax revenue from the federal government so that the federal government cannot give the red states the money they need and the federal government starts to shut down because it is unable to effectively administer the country as a whole.

Why should the farmers of Illinois depend on the federal government when the federal government is being poorly run due to a certain volatile individual in the White House who could care less about them? The Governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, was in Mexico trying to get good trade deals with that country for Illinois. Why not let Illinois directly negotiate with Mexico? I would prefer a governor who is more mentally stable than a president who just has temper tantrums. Truth be told, the states, and especially the blue states, have the interests of their people at heart more than the federal government does right now. With how badly the United States is being run currently, perhaps it is better that the country is run more like a confederation where the states have more power and can veto federal laws or nullify them more readily if they are in contravention to the state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution. This state power might make the federal government less authoritarian and less all-controlling.

The problem is that there is too much power now being concentrated into the hands of the federal executive. This has been the case for some time before Trump. Under Trump, it is that much worse now. What states, especially blue states, should do is make it clear that if they do not like how they are being treated (i.e. the federal government withhold funding for political reasons), then the blue states should withhold tax revenue and anything else that will contribute to the coffers of the federal government and run themselves more as semi-independent countries. Sometimes extreme circumstances call for extreme measures.