Americans increasingly vote like hostages negotiating with fate. Every election is sold as the most important of our lifetime. Every cycle becomes a final battle for the soul of the country. Then Tuesday becomes Wednesday, the sun rises, and people are left wondering why so little actually feels fixed.
Look at the country right now, and the easy story is partisan: The wrong people are running things, the other side has grabbed too much power, and if our team could just win, everything would finally make sense again.
But listen long enough to people who disagree on almost everything, and you keep hearing the same complaint. It is not only about who governs. It is that governing itself no longer seems to work the way people think it should.
Or, put more bluntly: It is not working.
Trust in federal institutions sits near historic lows. Congressional approval has spent years buried in the mid-teens. Elections feel existential, yet the aftermath often feels strangely hollow. The names change. The speeches change. The campaign slogans definitely change. Yet the machinery underneath somehow keeps grinding along in the same direction.
If both parties keep winning elections and losing the country, what exactly are we winning?
What if the real problem is not the teams but the field they are playing on?
For much of U.S. history, that field was designed carefully. Checks and balances did not simply mean Congress versus the president versus the courts. It also meant a serious division between federal authority and state authority. Federalism was not a side feature of the constitutional system. It was the operating system.
James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45 that the national government’s powers should be “few and defined,” while the powers of the states would remain “numerous and indefinite.” Behind that idea sat a remarkably realistic understanding of human nature: power likes to gather, then it likes to grow, and it almost never limits itself voluntarily.
So authority was dispersed. States handled matters where local knowledge mattered most, while the national government focused on truly national concerns. Space existed for experimentation, disagreement, and variation without requiring every issue to become a national struggle.
In short, a large and complicated country functioned by limiting how much everyone needed to agree on.
When that arrangement works, the political temperature drops. Policy fights stay policy fights. Elections do not automatically feel like national emergencies.
Imagine that.
Today, that system has largely flipped. Washington increasingly assumes the “numerous and indefinite” responsibilities Madison expected states to handle, treating nearly every local challenge as a customer service complaint that must be escalated to headquarters. Education, healthcare, infrastructure, and land use, once local concerns, now increasingly operate inside frameworks designed in Washington, funded by Washington, and regulated by Washington.
As authority gathers in one place, accountability tends to disappear. Success has a hundred fathers — failure apparently changed its phone number.
No wonder so many people feel detached.
The costs of this drift are real. Federal spending now operates at levels that would look reckless almost anywhere else. Long-term obligations tied to Social Security and Medicare continue growing faster than the broader economy. Meanwhile, large portions of federal spending increasingly run on autopilot, with Congress exercising direct control over only a fraction of the budget.
Try that at home. Imagine paying one out of every five bills on purpose and reassuring yourself that the other four will somehow sort themselves out.
They don’t.
People do not need spreadsheets to understand what is happening. They feel it at grocery stores, at gas pumps, and in monthly bills that somehow rise faster than paychecks. Economists can debate monetary policy. Families experience something simpler: When your dollar buys less year after year, it feels like a pay cut you never agreed to. Who would?
So how did we get here?
Washington did not simply accumulate power. It developed a habit. Over time, authority has increasingly centralized, particularly within the executive branch. Congress, many would argue, gradually surrendered constitutional ground. And nature hates a vacuum. When Congress stalls, presidents fill the space.
Both parties have done it: executive orders, regulatory expansion, emergency declarations, and administrative actions.
Government increasingly resembles the thermostat in my home. Every member of the family reaches for the controls.
One administration issues sweeping directives. The next tears them apart. The one after that restores them with a few edits and a fresh press release. Immigration policy shifts. Environmental rules shift. Student loan policy shifts.
Congress was designed to frustrate everyone equally. That was not a flaw. It was a feature. Durable lawmaking was supposed to move slowly because stability was the point.
Instead, policy increasingly operates by pendulum.
Businesses can adapt to taxes. They can adapt to regulations. They can adapt to changing markets. What they struggle to adapt to are regulatory weather patterns.
States struggle to plan. Citizens struggle to understand rules that may disappear after the next election. Eventually, frustration becomes exhaustion.
That raises a difficult question: Can a system built on laws continue functioning when increasingly it is run through executive action?
History rarely repeats itself neatly, but centralized systems often develop familiar symptoms: bloated bureaucracy, blurred accountability, and elites increasingly insulated from consequences.
These are not prophecies. They are reminders. Structural imbalance always carries a price.
Diagnosing a problem, however, is easier than fixing one. So what would restoring balance actually look like?
Utah has begun approaching the issue as a structural challenge rather than another partisan food fight. Instead of asking, “Which side should win?” policymakers have started asking a more basic question: Is the system functioning the way it was designed to?
That shift helped produce House Bill 488 in 2025. The bill is not a dramatic showdown with Washington. It does something less theatrical and possibly more consequential. It creates a framework allowing Utah to evaluate federal actions, examine constitutional alignment, and create an organized process for discussing where authority properly belongs.
In plain English, it serves as a reminder that states are not subsidiaries of Washington. They are governing partners.
That may sound obvious. But if it were truly obvious, why would we need reminding?
Somewhere along the way, federalism became something people praised in speeches and ignored in practice.
HB 488 attempts to make federalism operational again. That effort extends beyond legislation itself through Utah Valley University’s Center for Constitutional Studies and the National Federalism Initiative.
Its premise is simple: structure before politics. Instead of beginning with who benefits from policy, begin by asking whether government is operating at the appropriate level in the first place. Once that question changes, the conversation changes.
One aspect stands out in particular. In most professions, continuing education is treated as a basic responsibility: doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, and yes, even barbers.
Yet we built a system in which people can exercise enormous public authority, write laws, regulate industries, and shape constitutional boundaries without any training or expectation of continuing education on constitutional structure or federalism.
America sometimes appears more concerned with licensing haircuts than licensing power. That fact says more than we probably want it to.
In September 2025, these conversations moved onto a national stage when Utah hosted the first National Federalism Initiative Summit of States. Republicans and Democrats from 14 states showed up in the same room, which in modern politics now qualifies as a minor miracle.
The focus was not on partisan victories. It was on structural clarity: What belongs federally? What belongs locally? Where has the system drifted? The striking part was not universal agreement. It was agreement that the questions themselves matter.
Momentum is building. What once lived mostly in academic discussions is increasingly becoming a governing priority. Leaders in states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Hawaii are not only taking notice — they are taking action. They recently convened Senate presidents and House speakers from more than 30 states for a serious discussion on federalism, the proper balance between state and national authority, and where the boundaries of power should actually lie. The National Federalism Initiative’s second annual Summit of States, scheduled for August, is expected to broaden participation and deepen the dialogue even further.
Part of what makes this discussion important is that people increasingly treat every disagreement as if it requires a single national answer. But a country this large was never designed to function that way. Different states have different economies, industries, demographics, and priorities. Rural Wyoming and downtown Philadelphia do not face identical challenges. Utah and Hawaii are not interchangeable.
Federalism was never intended to eliminate disagreement. It was intended to manage it. The goal was not uniformity — it was stability. States could function as places for experimentation, adaptation, and local problem-solving without forcing every issue through the bottleneck of Washington.
That flexibility matters. It allows successful ideas to spread while allowing unsuccessful ones to fail on a smaller scale. More importantly, it lowers the stakes of political disagreement. Every policy question does not need to become a winner-take-all national conflict. Not every debate should end with half the country feeling conquered by the other half.
Because a country of 330 million people spread across different economies, cultures, and priorities cannot realistically expect national agreement on everything.
That is not unity. That is gridlock with better branding. Federalism offers another path — not necessarily by shrinking government, but by organizing it.
Not every disagreement needs to become a national showdown. Not every question requires a ruling from 2,000 miles away. Sometimes holding a country together requires loosening the grip at the top.
People do not need to agree on everything. A nation this large never will.
The question is whether we still remember how our system was designed to survive disagreement.
TWO-THIRDS OF AMERICANS BELIEVE FOUNDING FATHERS WOULD BE DISAPPOINTED IN THE NATION AT 250
That requires restraint from Washington, a Congress willing to reclaim its role, and states willing to act like governing partners rather than administrative branches.
Our constitutional system describes states as separate and independent sovereigns. The follow-up question almost asks itself: If that is true, why do we so rarely act like it?
Jason Thompson is a member of the Utah House of Representatives. Troy Smith is the director of the Constitutional Federalism Initiative at Utah Valley University.