January 8, 2005 - "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State." James
Madison the Federalist Papers # 45.

“CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Mich., Jan. 8 - President Bush concluded a week of campaigning to overhaul the nation's civil justice system on Friday by urging swift Congressional approval of legislation that would sharply limit the steadily growing number of lawsuits by workers and others who claim to have been injured from asbestos.” New York Times, January 8, 2005. The President thus concluded his one week campaign to alter the nation’s legal system that he commenced in Collinsville, Illinois on Monday. In Collinsville his target was medical liability lawsuits.

In the latter two thirds of the Twentieth Century the Republican Party has made in an article of its political faith that social programs on the federal level, beginning with the New Deal and Social Security, continuing through federal aid to education and Head Start, and with the creation of EPA and OSHA represented federal encroachment into areas that the founders traditionally left to the several states. In each of those programs and in a myriad of others the Republicans decried, the power of the federal government mandated action to benefit or protect ordinary Americans. The mantra ran, “It is for the States to decide”.

With nominal Republican control of each of the three branches of the federal government the Republicans are singing a different tune. Whether the subject is the nature of the marriage relationship or the current favorite, tort reform, the Republicans have shifted their ground demanding the imposition of federal power to alter or abolish the right of the states to determine their own destinies. In each case the drive is to restrict the several states from the exercise of their Constitutional Power to regulate concerning the lives, liberties, and properties of the people and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State. In each case the Republican drive is to wield federal power to reduce and restrict the protection of ordinary Americans or to eliminate their right to be compensated when they are intentionally or carelessly injured.

They call it “tort reform” but what they are trying to do is to reduce the powers reserved to the States in our Constitution. They want to eliminate State power to provide for its people through legislation and State Courts’ application of the principles of the Common Law. It is a new Federalism; alien to anything that Hamilton, Madison and Jay, the authors of the Federalist Papers, would recognize. It is an unprecedented grab for Federal power at the expense of State sovereignty that would alter irredeemably the delicate balance that the framers do carefully struck when they fashioned our system of shared sovereignty. When federal legislation purports to “reform” State law then we no longer have a Federal system of decentralized and shared sovereignty. It is the beginning of a federal autocracy centered in Washington to the detriment of our individual freedoms and liberty. That is the objective of the new Federalists.