YOU SAY YOU WANT SOME DEVOLUTION?

Reason's J. D. Tuccille gets to the heart of the matter.  "Government Shouldn't Be Important Enough To Fight Over."  Often it is, and his elaboration reinforces our stance on emphasizing the school board rather than the presidency.  He opens with a claim that might run counter to the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence about the Right of the People to alter destructive governments.

Government shouldn't be important enough to motivate people to kill others to gain control. Moreover, people willing to engage in violence to seize the means of governance have no business exercising political power. These are points we should be drumming home after the latest in a series of assassination attempts against President Donald Trump and other administration officials at a time of surging political violence in the United States.

You have to read through several paragraphs before it becomes clear his gripe is with Government from Washington.

The usual call, at this point, is for people to turn down the rhetoric. But that's pointless when Americans perceive that they're at risk from opponents who wield the vast power of government and plan to use it against them. That's not an irrational fear, and words aren't the danger here—the danger is government that reaches into all areas of life and which really is perilous in the hands of those motivated by malice.

"If in this country law has always been king, its empire has never been so expansive. More than ever, we turn to the law to address any problem we perceive. More than ever, we are inclined to use national authorities to dictate a single answer for the whole country," Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch and co-author Jane Nitze warned in a 2024 essay.

The "empire" that is "too expansive" is Government from Washington, and the discontents he invokes in getting to that assertion involve the national political parties treating slim governing majorities as an excuse to implement their most expansive policy wish-list, rather than as acting as a slightly more effective check on the implementations of the outgoing governing majority.  That, Mr Tuccille concludes, cannot end well.

At a time when Americans agree on so little—other than that they dislike each other—there are no "right" people to hold office and control the instruments of power. We've turned elections into existential threats to those who lose. We emphasized the "all" in "winner takes all," and we're paying the price.

Understandably fearful of government in the hands of enemies, Americans are literally fighting over political power. The violence won't stop, and will probably escalate, until there's no political danger worth fighting over.

Unfortunately, his essay ends there, rather than with a full-throated endorsement of enumerated, separated, and limited federal powers and an expansion of those policy decisions devolved to the several States and to the people.