Glue traps are among the cruelest ways to eliminate rodents. They're inhumane and can be dangerous to humans and their pets.
— Rep. Ted Lieu (@RepTedLieu) January 17, 2024
Pleased to introduce a bill today to place a national ban on glue traps. Learn more: https://t.co/UtfDpcL9DO
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Beverly Hills) has introduced a bill in Congress to nationally ban glue traps to catch rats. The U.S. government should force all 330 million people in the country to use whatever expensive way to catch rats is fashionable in Beverly Hills.
What could go wrong?
Seriously, this is an example of a general problem: under our federalist system, pest control practices are obviously something that should be decided at the local or state level. But, the most energetic politicians, such as Ted Lieu (who replaced the formidable Howard Waxman when he retired), rise up to Washington and tend to try to nationalize everything.
Politicians in both parties are prone to this tendency to try to impose their prejudices on the whole country. For example, having a lot of Good Guys with a Gun walking around packing heat makes sense in, say, the rattlesnake-ridden southwestern backcountry where police response times are long. But lots of inner cities have more Bad Guys with a Gun than Good Guys with a Gun, so letting big city police hassle dirtbags carrying illegal handguns can be an effective way to reduce murders.
The federalist idea is that politicians who go to Washington D.C. from wildly different parts of the country should refrain from trying to impose their local prejudices on the whole country.
But … it tends to be a sure-fire vote winner back home for Congressmen to try to impose local values, such as Beverly Hills views on humane rodent control, on the rest of the country.
During some periods of American history, Southern politicians provided strong support for a federalist non-aggression principle in domestic legislation, such as in the early Republic up to about the middle of the 19th Century, back when Southern politicians were embarrassed by slavery and tried to keep the South’s peculiar institution on the back burner in Washington . (But then during the 1850s King Cotton bubble, Southerners became wildly enthusiastic about slavery as the Wave of the Future and started imposing obnoxious mandates on the North, such as the Fugitive Slave Act, with unfortunate consequences.) And then during Jim Crow, Southern politicians didn’t try too hard to impose their weird social system on the North, as long as the rest of the country left them alone.
But from the time of the triumph of Civil Rights onward, no region has anything they are all that embarrassed by anymore. In fact, everybody in modern America tends to assume that their way of doing things is morally superior to the evil glue-trapping ways they do things elsewhere.
That would work okay if we had a stronger tendency to celebrate our federalism and constantly remind each other of why federalism in a continent-sized country is wise and prudent. But we don’t.
But, unlike in 1861, we don’t even have any seemingly practical way to divide the country up on lines of latitude or longitude. Practically every state now has blue cities and red rural areas that are economically dependent upon each other.
So, we are stuck with each other.
