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While it may indeed take much effort and skill to compromise on disparate budget numbers or whether to have a public health-insurance option, these compromises are rather narrow.  Yet they are the stuff of members of Congress.  I don’t believe that they relish making them; it can be quite difficult to for the elected representatives and Senators to explain their votes for bills that differ from the stated positions. The problem, I contend, is that our politicians are not thinking big enough when it comes to compromising.  In fact, were they to enlarge the domain in which they compromise, they could keep closer to their stated positions.  This sounds counter-intuitive, so I’ll provide an example.

Take Rep. Barney Frank, who with Sen. Chris Dodd headed the work on the health-insurance law of 2010.  Frank would undoubtedly have preferred a pubic option, yet he believed he had to drop it because of the power of the extant private health-insurance companies. Now take virtually any Republican representative in the U.S. House. The republican position was to oppose the expansion in medicaid, which will subsidize health-insurance for those Americans unable to purchase it on their own.  Neither Frank nor any of his republican colleagues are happy with the resulting law. Had they all taken a bigger-picture view, they would have realized that they both could have seen their respective pristine positions in action.  Specifically, had Frank looked at his home state of Massachusetts, he could have realized that leaving health-care policy with the state governments (with the federal government no longer resisting state action, and perhaps even encouraging it) could have resulted in some instances of universal coverage and others more market-driven.  Indeed, perhaps a state such as Oregon would have gone single-payer while Texas relies more on private enterprise. Perhaps Frank and the republicans in the House could have agreed on a minimum federal standard—effectively saying what being an American entitles one to in terms of health-care—while leaving it up to the several states to tailor their own health-systems to their respective political climates.

I contend, moreover, that federalism can provide a means by which many of the disagreements between the two major parties can be resolved.  Artificially funneling these differences into U.S. government law has the effect of stultifying the political process on the federal level.  Ultimately, our elected officials (and ourselves) would need to accept a certain degree of tolerance, for there would indeed be states which enact domestic laws with which you and I disagree.  The United States, being on the scale of an empire with its fifty republics, is inherently diverse, just as other empires have been.  England and Egypt were hardly of the same culture and yet they were both provinces in the Roman Empire.  So too are Vermont and Oklahoma quite different culturally.  To expect that “one size fits all” in the United States, or back in the Roman Empire (or the British Empire, or that of the Mongols or Persians), is to clog our political plumbing, which in turn puts pressure on the system until it implodes or explodes.  Part of the solution is looking for candidates who think outside the box (or pipe).