I don’t know anything about Medina but I do know A State doesn’t need to secede in order to extricate itself from at least some of the power the federal government has grabbed for itself over the last century.
I call it “secession in place.”
Even today there are clearly programs that the only way the federal government “forces” the states to participate in is through refusing to give them money if they don’t. For example, states must participate in the federal school lunch program if they want to continue to receive federal dollars (misnomer) for education (that’s probably also a misnomer). There are many ways the States allow the federal government to intrude upon the people simply because the penalty for not volunteering such access is loss of various federal funding. It’s okay (constitutionally) for the federal government to tie the flow of federal money to its program goals, but the States do often have the power to refuse that money and do things their way, if only they will.
The question in those cases is, in fact, the political will of the State to go without the fedbucks and make it somehow on its own.
A great and fascinating website on these issues is: http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/
Refuse the money and you don’t have to abide by the strings tied to the money.
Doesn't the federal government get its money from the states? The states collect the taxes and send them to washington. What would happen to the federal government if the states refused to send any money to Washington? Including Income Tax...
Unfortunately, people would not stand for it. They want their fed money, because they pay fed taxes. Recently when one of the more conservative governors said he would not accept stimulus money, there was such an uproar that he had to relent.
Everybody wants to maintain their place at the trough. They want the other guy to give up his. This is why we are on the spending train to destruction.
It’s kind of funny that “pay to play” is considered scandalous behaviour until the federal government does it. Several states now have laws to forbid the practice, but the fed can pay to play whenever it wants. I suppose it will take an egregious abuse, like Kelo, before the practice is reexamined in the light of undue influence. A lot of people think that the use of federal money to control state legislatures is wrong.