It’s Paducah, not Paduka.

As to “States Rights”, the federal government is the good side, and any person or community that objects to anything the federal government wants to do is simply acting out of bigotry.

States have no rights that the federal government is bound to respect. The constitution is no bar to any extension of federal authority, nor should it be.
The Department of Education has done a magnificent job improving education across the country. Local authorities just make a mess of it.

Witness, for instance, the case of Michelle Rhee. In the District of Columbia, the locals just threw her out, scrapping the reforms she’d been heroically working on. Now, the federal government needs to step in, take back control of the schools from the local yokels, and do the job right, as only the dept of education can.

Happily, the rights and wrongs of the situation are plain for all to see, and DC isn’t even a state so trumping the so-called “rights” of local entities should be a cakewalk.

Local authorities don’t set speed limits, we have federal laws for that. They don’t stick their noses into matters that are none of their business, such as immigration. We have federal officers to apprehend and deport illegal immigrants. The federal government decides the level of enforcement and that’s that. States now stick their noses into federal matters such as kidnapping, or counterfeiting, and that must stop. No person, other than an ATF agent, should be permitted to declare or voice a suspicion that a bill he’s been passed is counterfeit. No one should be allowed to bring such a note to the attention of the ATF. As to kidnapping, local authorities must stand aside. Federal law must prevail.

Now you will be thinking this is ridiculous. The federal government lacks the manpower to do all this without any assistance from states. True, for now. But why not nationalize state budgets and state law officers? That way, the federal government would instantly acquire a force sufficient to do any job it needed, or wanted, to do. The federal government could reassign so-called “state” officers to the places where they were most needed.

So-called “state” and “municipal” courts, judges, jails, and so forth ought also to be nationalized. One federal policy, one law, one people. Any variation from the perfection that is the federal government is abhorrent.

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Or maybe, nationalizing everything is neither prudent nor practical, and states rights and some degree of local self rule is a legitimate concern. Bigotry there is, but it’s not the only motivating factor when it comes to wanting the federal government not just to leave some matters to the states, but to be constrained by law and bound by the constitution to leave some matters to state and local authorities.

Not, of course, the matter of whether evolution is taught in science class. And though I think that Rhee is a hero and that DC’s decision to scrap her reforms is a tragedy, I think that DC must be permitted to ruin its own schools and scrap its own future, because freedom includes the right to screw up, royally. We can’t live as a nation under a federal government that steps in to forestall every decision that anybody anywhere makes that looks like a mistake to the feds.