I agree. That Katrina thing, was a real shocker, all around. We were there - we were in Jackson MS five days after the hurricane, and we actually made it into New Orleans about a week later. It was horrible, I still have nightmares about what we saw there. And my wife was pregnant at the time, and she insisted on coming along to do whatever she could to help - yeah, it was bad.

And you are certainly right - there's more than enough blame to go around. Blanco especially seems to have been "quite confused" and overwhelmed -

But on the other hand, you kinda had to see what has happening "on the ground" to understand how the feds were contributing to the massive muck-up - I mean, f'r instance, they'd shut down a lot of the roads, and the result of that was that emergency vehicles and supplies couldn't get in or out - BUT, they were letting through the news crews. Go figure. These are the FEDS I'm talking about - the FEMA people - not the locals. FEMA was actually trying to control the streets. I kid you not. I was there, and I saw it with my own eyes. We were like, six or seven car-lengths behind one of Joe Scarborough's trucks when they got turned back, and Nicky and I got really pissed off and went AROUND the road-block and no one followed us or tried to stop us. Guess they were too busy trying to turn back all the other people who wanted to help.....

I think, that is "it seems to me", that there ought to be a pretty clear boundary in terms of the division of what belongs to the feds and what belongs to the States. Constitutionally, it's pretty clear - it's even EXPLICIT in the Tenth Amendment. But practically speaking, it's pretty clear too - I mean, there are certain things that ONLY the federal government can do - like, national defense, and perhaps the kind of emergency coordination that occurs when "many states" are involved in a natural disaster, something like that - these, I think, most people would agree that things like these are "essential" federal functions.

But this boundary that we're talking about, between the feds and the States, has been blurred in several ways recently, and most of it has to do with the feds trying to exercise ever-increasing jurisdictions in areas that don't really belong to them. My "low-hanging-fruit" example in this area lately, has been "medical dispensation" - I mean, think about it - people are married in states, and doctors are licensed in states, but the federal government claims jurisdiction on drug dispensation and in the area of medical triage and end-of-life issues. I mean, this stuff makes NO SENSE, it's very schizophrenic. But, the situation is pretty complicated by now, 'cause there are definitely special interests involved, and so on, and in many cases the feds may be more responsive to the needs of corporate America than they are to the needs of individuals.

I'm kinda a "States'-Rights" guy to begin with, in the Reagan-conservative mold, and when the feds try to "acquire" powers behind my back, it makes me very nervous. This whole thing about wiretapping and eavesdropping and so on, I haven't fully decided on yet - it seems to me that there are legimate needs in that area that have arisen on the basis of advances in technology, that are not fully covered by the scenarios that the Founding Fathers may have been able to imagine a couple hundred years ago - but on the other hand, the PRINCIPLES they agreed on back then, are still sound, and I'm not sure yet where I would actually draw that boundary -

But "wherever" it's drawn, it seems to me that changes like this need to be part of a legitimate Constitutional process. It won't do for the Prez (or whoever - DNI or NSA or pick another) to say, "well, we have a crisis today so we're just going to ignore this little sentence in the Constitution for a while".... I mean, if I were to accede to that kind of thing, as a citizen I'd want my Prez to fully explain why he was doing it, and also I'd want to know about the sunset provision in any laws that might be entered into the books in that regard -

That kind of thing. See what I mean? We could get much more specific in terms of examples - I mean, there are literally thousands of cases where the federal government is trying to either blackmail or extort the States - in some cases they want to "outright" force them to do certain things via legislation, and it seems that the above precedent kinda puts a dent into that concept -

And then in other cases, they'll say "we won't give you any highway money unless you crack down on drunk drivers", or "we won't give you any education money unless you follow the NCLB guidelines", or whatever it may be - and cases like this are kinda "on the border" right now, in terms of where they stand in relation to the Tenth Amendment -

But I suspect that if a few more cases of this type were brought before the Supreme Court, we could eventually get a better definition of the boundary between the feds and the States, and that, it seems to me, would be helpful -

Especially in cases like we seem to have now, where some people think it's an "emergency and we're on a war footing", and other people say it's not so bad and we really shouldn't be at war at all .... and the President happens to fall into the more restrictive camp, causing considerable concern among the population at large -

And in my opinion, there's that much concern precisely because this area is kinda gray and ill-defined, from the standpoint of case law and so on, and the few Constitutional decisions that have been made (at least the ones that carry any weight) are fairly recent -

As recently as 1932, a Supreme Court opinion expressed the viewpoint that the Tenth Amendment was just a tautology, and basically what I'm reading in Scalias' opinion is a dissent, as if to say, "no it's not - it's a very important and fundamental limitation on federal powers".

So, I mean, this actually give me hope, to have a conservative judge like that pick up on a delicate issue like this -

I mean, that surprised the hell out of me when I read Scalia's name on the opinion, and I found myself thinking "you go, dude" - 'cause I dunno, sometimes people confuse the "strict constructionists" with the "narrow constructionists", and I was very happy and relieved to see that Scalia was apparently coming down in the former camp on this issue.