State government is discussed across several episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as one layer in the American federal arrangement, defined less by its own institutions than by its relationship to Washington and to localities. Guests and host return to the question of which powers belong to the states, how those powers have changed over time, and whether states or the federal government better serve liberty and the interests of citizens.
Running a state like a business
In a 2010 episode, Gary Johnson, responding to a caller identified as Evan from Portland, Oregon, described his approach to governing a state. Asked how he convinced voters he was qualified despite having no prior government experience, Johnson said he made the pitch that he would run state government like a business, with best product, best service and lowest price. He said he was attacked for that in his first campaign, but that in his second campaign he argued he had actually run state government that way for four years and asked voters whether they wanted that to continue. He was re-elected, and he told the caller it is more than possible to have a common-sense business approach to state government, challenging people to give him an exception to where best product, best service, lowest price does not benefit those served. Johnson also said he ran two campaigns for Governor without mentioning his opponent in print, radio or television, not even as “my opponent,” and spent no money on that. When criticized, he said he viewed it as double advertising and would simply talk about issues such as education, advocating school choice and bringing competition to public education. Bob Zadek’s framing of the segment was that Johnson had been elected and re-elected in a state that was two-to-one Democrat A Better America (2010).
Cooperative federalism and the Clean Air Act
A 2017 episode with Ted Hadzi-Antich examined the phrase “an experiment in cooperative federalism” as applied to the Clean Air Act. Bob Zadek asked Hadzi-Antich to explain what cooperative federalism means in the context of the Act as originally structured. Hadzi-Antich said federalism as a general matter refers to the relationship between the federal government and the state government, and which aspects of law and regulation the feds are responsible for and which aspects the states are responsible for. He said the United States Constitution enumerates the very limited powers of the federal government and, under the reserve clause, reserves to the states all other powers not specifically enumerated for the federal government. He said the Clean Air Act in 1967 coined the phrase “cooperative federalism” How the EPA Violated the Clean Air Act (2017).
The 17th Amendment and state sovereignty
Two 2019 episodes with Randall Holcombe address the 17th Amendment and its effect on the states. In the earlier episode, Bob Zadek called the 17th Amendment a fascinating subject and noted that it follows the 16th Amendment, which he identified as the income tax, saying the two amendments changed forever the nature of American government and voters’ relationship to their government. He said the 17th Amendment was changed in 1913, during the beginning of the second Progressive Era, when Teddy Roosevelt was president and there was populism and power to the people. He described a minor scandal in which a Senator bribed or through other nefarious means got elected by a statehouse, which got into the press, and said it was felt that power should be put in the people. Zadek said the states had representation in Washington as a political body, that the Senate was their house, and that the states could protect their interest against intrusion by the federal government into the police power, which was historically reserved for the states. In his opinion, as a result of the 17th Amendment, states changed over time from independent co-equal political bodies to merely agencies of Washington, so that the state of California became, if you will, the California Department of the federal government, and that is substantially the way states operate today [[episodes/john_marini_on__unmasking_the_administrative_state|John Marini on Unmasking the Administrative State (2019)]].
Holcombe added that another effect of the 17th Amendment was that it made it easier to pass legislation, because before the amendment the House represented the interests of the people and the Senate represented the interests of the state governments, so any law had to be approved by both the representatives of the people and the representatives of the states. With direct election of Senators, Senators became representatives of the people too, lowering the bar so that legislation no longer had to meet with the approval of the representatives of the states. He offered Obamacare as a concrete example, saying the Affordable Healthcare Act imposed higher costs on the states because the states had to expand their Medicaid programs, and that if the Senate represented the interests of the state governments it is pretty likely Obamacare would not have been able to shift some of those costs to the state governments. Bob Zadek agreed, saying he would have picked the same example, and discussed unfunded mandates, which he described as Washington requiring the states to adopt certain policies and carry out certain federal government goals without giving them the money to do so. He said there would never be even one unfunded mandate because the states, through the Senate, would not enact the legislation, and that without the 17th Amendment states become far less the “laboratories of democracy” and laboratories of innovation that Chief Justice Brandeis observed at the beginning of the 20th century. Zadek also said that as power devolves to Washington, the cost is personal liberty, and that by how we vote we are willing to surrender our liberty in favor of giving more power to Washington.
In the later 2019 episode, Holcombe described the Senate as originally designed by the founders, with senators chosen by the state legislatures rather than by the voters, and said the 17th Amendment, passed in 1913, changed that to direct voting for senators. He said that up until 1913 the Constitution specified that senators are chosen by the state legislatures, an effort to deliberately insulate the Senate from democratic pressures, and that one of the things the founders wanted was for the Senate to represent the interests of the state governments, not the people. He noted that federal judges have always been appointed, never elected, and that the President was to be chosen basically by the Electoral College and maybe by the House of Representatives Randall G. Holcombe on Liberty in Peril (2019).
Infrastructure ownership and state responsibility
A 2020 episode with Chris Edwards turned to infrastructure. Edwards said the first thing to know is that the vast majority of infrastructure in America is owned by the private sector, whether gas pipelines, electric utilities or semiconductor factories, and that all cell phone towers are private. He said government infrastructure is much smaller than private infrastructure, but that the vast majority of government infrastructure is owned by state and local governments, not the federal government. He said America’s entire highway system is owned by state and local governments, and that even the interstate highway system is entirely owned by state governments. Edwards said that if people think there are potholes in their highways, their state government is entirely capable of raising taxes to find the money to fill those potholes or repurposing other spending to fill them, so the solution does not have to come from Washington. He said the problem with Washington involvement is strings attached to spending, pork barrel money going to states with powerful congressmen rather than states that need it, waste, money stuck in expensive bureaucracies in Washington, and biased spending on what he called wasteful infrastructure like light rail systems rather than expanded highway systems. He said the solution to infrastructure is in state governments but mainly in the private sector, and that most infrastructure in America is private. Bob Zadek summarized Edwards’s position as not objecting to the amount of infrastructure spending but to who does the spending, saying it is up to the state to decide how to spend its money and that he would defer to the states and the political process on which roads to fix. Zadek described federal spending decisions as politically determined through “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” with powerful subcommittee chairmen getting money for their districts to build useless airports, support local airports and support train stops at local stations that nobody gets on and off. Edwards agreed and said that with cell phone towers or the internet there is no public policy discussion about how much investment is needed because private companies figure it out in the marketplace, and that the same is true with electric utilities. He said the problem in government sectors like passenger rail, run by Amtrak as a government monopoly, or airports, all of which in America are owned by government, is that how much to invest becomes a political and pork barrel issue. He said most airports in Europe are private, that Heathrow Airport in London is private, and that any airport in Canada is private, and that the first thing to do is take assets the government owns and mismanages and move them to the private sector. He said Trump made this point on airports, saying a lot of American airports are poorly run and mismanaged and using the phrase “third-world airports,” and that our airports have not kept up because they are in the government sector. He also cited air traffic control, saying Britain and Canada have privatized their systems, funded by fees on airlines, and that their systems work really well and are more advanced than ours today Is it too late to step back from the edge of fiscal insanity? (2020).
Local versus state control of zoning
A 2023 episode with Christian Britschgi addressed who controls zoning. Bob Zadek framed the issue as whether the locality or the state controls zoning and related issues, saying he favors local control versus state control as a principle of federalism writ small, just as he favors states versus the feds, and that the closer government is to him the happier he is because he has more individual control. He told his audience that his bias of local control versus state control puts him on the wrong side of the issue because state control seems more interested in more and lower-cost housing, and said that as a libertarian he is conflicted. Britschgi said the basic way to think about it is the interests of the state government versus the local government: local government is very sensitive to the concerns of people who already live in the community, such as the impact a new development might have on property values, traffic, shadows or bird deaths, but is probably less sensitive to the ability of people who do not live in the community to move in. As a result, localities tend to have more restrictive rules than if those rules were set at the state government level, where people are moving around more and there is a more general interest in economic growth. He said the movement in zoning reform has generally been to shift some decisions about how restrictive local governments can be from the local government to the state government. Britschgi said he is a federalist too, but that is why he favors some states trying out shifting zoning decisions to the state level, because federalism to him is the arrangement in the Constitution whereby states have wide control over their own policies, the federal government has very limited control, and local governments are basically not mentioned at all. He said it is kind of silly that every state gives local governments the most control over land use and reserves a pretty small role for the state, and that he would like to see more state-level experimentation, more laboratories of democracy, trying out making these policy decisions at the state level, because states are generally going to have a greater interest in housing affordability and be less likely to be captured by interests with strong preferences for restricting housing production. Bob Zadek responded that as a libertarian Britschgi is not a federalist, and that in 1787 he would be an anti-federalist, not a Hamiltonian, saying he wanted to correct that lest the audience touch their dials. Zadek said Britschgi’s point has profound merit and great appeal on housing, but that the danger is if those who favor a stronger general government, the federal government, could quote Britschgi’s very words in support of their position. Zadek said his problem is that for him to favor state control makes him worry that he does not really favor more control to the citizen, because the difference is moving control away from the voter, which to him is pretty gosh darn important. He said he struggles with his position on zoning and is conflicted with his own libertarian views, and asked Britschgi to be his support group. Britschgi said he maybe misspoke, because his aim is not state control or local control but individual control, and that it is a question of judgment and prudence which layer of government will produce decisions that give individuals more control or less. He said the evidence is largely that local governments have been very restrictive and states a little less so, but that there is still plenty of reason to worry about what states will do with their powers on land use, since environmental review rules are set at the state level. He said that when it comes to whether you are allowed to build an apartment building on a piece of residentially zoned land, the state government is going to be a little bit better about letting you do that than your local government Free to Build (2023).
Across episodes
The episodes do not trace a single developing argument so much as return to the same question at different levels. The 2010 episode treats state government as a unit to be managed like a business; the 2017 episode treats it as a partner with the federal government under cooperative federalism; the two 2019 episodes treat it as a body whose sovereignty was diminished by the 17th Amendment; the 2020 episode treats it as the primary owner of government infrastructure and the appropriate locus for infrastructure decisions; and the 2023 episode treats it as a possible counterweight to restrictive local zoning. The later treatments are more concerned with which layer of government protects individual control, while the earlier ones are more concerned with how state government is run and how it relates to Washington.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the structure of state legislatures, governors’ offices or state courts, nor do they give founding dates or enabling statutes for state governments. They do not state which state a given city is in, the name of any bill, or what any case held or which amendment it turned on, except where the 16th and 17th Amendments are named. The excerpts also break off at several points, including the end of the 2020 infrastructure segment and the conclusion of the 2023 episode, so no further statements from those moments are available.