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Comment by purple-again | Hacker News Reader

One of the main points of the federation model was that it should be able to scale. Local regions rule themselves in nearly all things (the governor is the president of Alabama) and the regions people are only required to comply with a small number of issues that effect everyone (like national defense).

Of course we all know how that ended up. The federal powers increased steadily until we got where we are. This is one of the reasons you see so much anger against the coasts and cities.

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With some exceptions, Federal powers increased because we couldn't agree that human beings are not property, among other basic rights issues. The touchstone moments were not simple disagreements on policy, it was the pot boiling over into extreme violence. Even the Federal model requires some basic level setting for it to function. There's either a rebalancing or the whole thing falls apart.

Regardless, GP's points are notable just a local level. States have different weights assigned to executive and legislative. It appears that Arizona leans heavily towards a strong executive branch although I have to wonder if any laws were broken here. People expect corruption in US politics at this point but this incident has some staying power in the news.

More so federal funding has bent states into the shape that the federal government wants them to be. Funding with strings and the interstate commerce clause subdued the States’ power realistically.

I didn't mean that the federal agencies should necessarily have a role here. I would think that many US states also have agencies charged with administrating the law, something like a "Arizona Roadway Authority" or whatever.

My comment was trying to explain how even within a single hierarchy like a state's executive, which a Governor at the top and traffic engineers somewhere below, it's peculiar to see someone jump so many levels of that hierarchy to assume control of a rather low-level decision.

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