Federalism was an idea the founding fathers came up with in order to deal with the fear of a monarchy, tyranny and the weaknesses of human nature.  The 10th Amendment to the Constitution didn't create that right as it was already a part of the plan. It merely announced it and reaffirmed that power and sovereignty in the new nation would be like no other - not even the ancient Greek and Roman models which the founders studied.  The genius and challange - the enigma - was that all the details and particulars were not spelled out for first practitioners of the world's oldest democracy.  They had to find their way, create precedents and to some extent, make it up as they went along.  So much of the Federalist debate in the first Four Score and Seven Years of the Nation revolved around one issue: slavery.  In fact, pro-slavery Americans tainted the belief in States Rights for generations by using it as a club to pound home their right to govern without interference in a way to preserve an economy and way of life built upon the backs of slaves. The outcome of the Civil War dealt a heavy blow not only to slavery but also, unfairly I believe in the long run, to States Rights. But there was more, so much more in our history that wore away at the power and sovereignty of the States. There was the brute force of a presidency when Theodore Roosevelt sat in the Oval Office. There was the intellectual arguments made into policy of Woodrow Wilson. There was nothing greater in the 20th Century than FDR's New Deal that sped up the flow of power away from the states and to Washington DC.  Civil Rights law in Brown v Board of Education and the successes of LBJ on the same subject and failures of LBJ with much of the Great Society that further enshrined the notion and de facto practice of intended solutions and policy coming from the national government; that is, from the top down.  The efforts to stem the tide and return a smidge of power back to the states by Nixon and Ford was not sustained, though the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan on the subject was stirring.  Bit by bit the imbalance has grown with few pauses to the point where the very imbalance owns a share of the blame for the dysfunction we get in our government today.  What we need as we announce near the Ides is a March Madness for Federalism -- a competition whereby states compete to propose and implement and prove out great policy solutions. Solutions that can be shared with other states with the brains and humility to know a good thing when they see it.  We are a nation built on the competitive spirit and innovation -- why do we waste away our greatest strengths.  Louis Brandeis made famous the idea that states ought to be the Laboratories of Democracy. We had Robert La Follette who governed this way in Wisconsin. Perhaps a few others. But for the most part this promise of a shared balance of power and sovereignty has been mostly aspirational. It's time to makes moves to live out that aspiration and to balance the scales; to make our republic function as it was intended. We ought to immediately use Federalism in pressing issues like the minimum wage and infrastructure. We ought to use it as well to lower the risk of new policy ideas trying them out one state at a time and shining the light of attention where it belongs: on the states of this union.