National Review: Pruitt Outlines Jeb’s Federalism Focus
Jeb Bush’s Federalism Platform
by SCOTT PRUITT
Putting Washington in its place.
Since my election as Oklahoma attorney general in 2010, I have been a proud member of a group of federalism-minded state attorneys general who have methodically, indeed relentlessly, worked to restore the proper balance of power between the federal government and the states. In the past few months we have convinced the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to block President Obama’s unlawful executive action on illegal immigration and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to block the Obama EPA’s unlawful Waters of the United States rule. Meanwhile, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is currently considering our request to block the Obama EPA’s unlawful takeover of state energy economies through its so-called Clean Power Plan.
These lawsuits aren’t just jurisdictional turf wars between the states and Washington. No, as the Supreme Court has recognized, federalism is “more than an exercise in setting the boundary between different institutions of government for their own integrity.” Rather, it “secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.” Our constitutional structure in fact rests on what the Supreme Court has said might seem like a counterintuitive insight, that “freedom is enhanced by the creation of two governments, not one.” And as the Court has also pointed out, while today we focus on the Bill of Rights as the primary protector of individual liberty, the Framers saw the vertical separation of powers embedded in the structure of the Constitution as the bulwark of individual liberty, “first by protecting the integrity of the governments themselves, and second by protecting the people, from whom all governmental powers are derived.”
That is why I fight this federalism fight. There simply is no greater threat to individual liberty and the viability of our great nation than the threat that comes from the continued consolidation of power in Washington, a consolidation that flies in the face of the division of power between the federal government and the states that is required by the Constitution.