Revived federalism is a start, but it doesn’t go far enough.

It's a given in American politics that partisans become born-again believers in federalism when their faction is out of power in Washington, D.C., only to lose faith in decentralization the next time they win control of Congress and the presidency. Bossing folks around is, after all, a lot more fun than being bossed around. So, it's refreshing to see in this deeply divided country at least tentative steps towards bipartisan agreement that not every issue should be settled by dictates issued from the nation's capital. As encouraging as it is, though, this grudging acceptance of live-and-let-live doesn't go far enough.

"American federalism has always been a partisan issue — the GOP are the modern advocates," notes Democratic political adviser and former legislator Frank Pignanelli in the Deseret News. "But the left-leaning have reason to be equally suspicious of overreaching nationalism on key issues: privacy, immigration, environment, etc."

Pignanelli joined with Republican counterpart LaVarr Webb to warn of frantic pandemic-era spending and rules-making by first the Trump and then the Biden administrations. "[T]his immense federal intervention comes at the risk of making states even more subservient to the federal government, both financially and with more federal regulation and mandates."

Pignanelli isn't the first Democrat to discover the attractions of decentralization.

"In the wake of the presidential election, as Democrats realized that Republicans will soon control all three branches of the federal government, progressives disinclined to secede from the Union rediscovered another exit strategy: states' rights," Jeffrey Rosen wrote for The New York Times in 2016. Democrats spent the next several years battling for local governance against the Trump administration's insistence on federal control over matters such as immigration and marijuana.