This Salon article says, in summation, that states do not have rights, only people do.
Not quite.
I understand the sentiment. People have rights, and should have rights, while legal entities do not (or, at least, not as many).
States are legal entities, comprised of the residents thereof. The author takes “states’ rights” to be a codephrase for racism and maybe other -isms, but that is not necessarily true. I say, not necessarily, because it can be. But, when the founders of the republic thought about states’ rights, it seems to me that at least some of them were legitimately concerned with the idea that the people who live there (wherever they live) should have more control over their lives than the people who live everywhere else.
Fundamentally, that’s what states’ rights is about. The word “state” is just a shorthand for the “people who live within a cohesive geographical boundary.” And, their governments.
The states and the residents do have legitimate concerns. The centralized government cannot handle all of the issues that crop up in each and every state, and in each and every district within each state.
If there were no legitimate state interests, then there would be no need for state courts or state agencies or state government at all. Clearly, we need state courts. We could not survive without state courts. We could not survive without individual state governments, and the interests the governments represent.
These interests are, we, the people of the states, as a cohesive unit) rather than reducing our interests to individual interests.
If we, the national public body, have national interests and national rights, then we, the state public bodies, also have analogous (though likely distinguishable) state interests and state rights.
The 10th Amendment may seem quaint and antiquated by some modern standards, but I think it still has a place in our democratic republic.
Like I said at the outset, I think I understand the sentiment; but I think the article was too narrow in its analysis of rights.
