Blue State Failure Is Destroying Federalism And The Constitution

Personal note to Democrats: If you hate Donald Trump and really believe that he yearns to rule as an authoritarian, stop voting for dismal failures like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. They’re creating power vacuums with enormous zones of unchecked failure, and those vacuums are being filled.

The examples are everywhere, but start here: In Los Angeles, a long-running animal abuse crisis has been going unaddressed, and is getting steadily worse. An animal rescue activist named Joey Tuccio documents the problem as he tries to solve it, posting an endless flood of videos of caged and wounded dogs dying in homeless encampments.

Skid Row is a disaster, for people and for animals, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Homeless drug addicts breed pit bulls in encampments as a street business, and do it about as carefully as you’d expect in a place called Skid Row. Tuccio finds dogs being bred with untreated broken bones, being tossed into the gutter to bleed to death, starving to death, and on and on. It’s a parade of horrors in a place of endless degradation.

One of Tuccio’s recurring themes is that he can’t get local officials to do anything. Los Angeles has animal control officers, and they sometimes drop in on Skid Row. Then they shrug and leave. The city, Tuccio argues, would rather not know about it.

But someone has finally taken action. Last year, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles announced the formation of an animal abuse task force: “Acting United States Attorney Bill Essayli today announced the creation of a federal animal abuse task force aimed at prosecuting violations of the federal Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act signed into law by President Trump in 2019.”

That task force is making arrests. This week, federal prosecutors charged a 53-year-old man in the suburban community of Hacienda Heights with many felonies after they allegedly caught him breeding pit bulls for dog fights. Federal agents serving a search warrant found “an emaciated pit bull that was bleeding and chained to a cable in the yard; a second pit bull with scars in a bloody caged area; five dog treadmills; a rope with a scale for weighing dogs; and a skin stapler and syringes.” The FBI’s Los Angeles office posted on social media about its role in the arrests.

This is great news, and it’s also completely insane. It means that someone is finally bothering to address an obvious, serious, and long-neglected problem. But it also means that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is searching for “dog treadmills,” doing the role of local animal control officers, because blue states do everything poorly. A problem that cries out for simple local action is being done by the central government. Washington, D.C., is in charge of making sure that dogs in Los Angeles aren’t mistreated.

The American constitutional order assigns limited power to the federal government, assigning it — in the now mostly discarded theory — to military, diplomatic, and interstate matters. States are supposed to have independent sovereignty, entirely performing their own internal regulation. And now the FBI is driving around Los Angeles, looking for evidence that people are hurting dogs in their backyard. The retreat of state and local government from basic state and local governance in favor of endless symbol-performance about trans rights and Orange Man Bad lawsuits …

… has created a demand for responsible authority that, in practice, centralizes power. Federal authority is growing into spaces abandoned by the people who are supposed to be doing neglected work.

The FBI also recently spent a bunch of its time searching the offices of the Los Angeles Unified School District, apparently looking for evidence of corruption, as a useless school board fails to keep its house in order. And federal agents have swarmed into Minneapolis to hunt for fraud in government-funded daycare and medical transportation programs.

A bunch of problems that should be finding easy solutions at the state and local level are slipping toward federal intervention because they aren’t being addressed at the state and local level. MacArthur Park in Los Angeles has been a completely out-in-the-open drug market for years, by the way, with gang activity and constant overdoses, some fatal, near playgrounds for children. Once again, you’ll never guess who just made a bunch of arrests there.

Animals shouldn’t be abused in Los Angeles, and the FBI very much shouldn’t be the agency that prevents it. But here we are. The blue model of government is that state and local officials give you free money and celebrate you as you trans your kids, but they’re not at all tuned in to problems like keeping the city from burning or paving the streets. They’re too busy virtue-signaling and distributing cash to their client groups. The vacuum of blue state failure is a political disaster, and it’s rapidly getting worse.

This is an invitation to centralized power, and mere competence and stewardship would withdraw that invitation. Blue states and cities that don’t get their own houses in order lead us down an unfortunate and extremely obvious path. Federalism requires state and local government to work.

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.