US states are standing by for action after Obama ignores congress and uses regulation to advance his agenda

10/31, "Aftermath," Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez

"So if the president loses Congress, how will he make good on his threat to punish those who took it from him or let it happen? That avenging “we” isn’t going to be the now-Republican Congress. It will be the federal bureaucracy led by the executive branch. As Krauthammer notes, “over the next two years,

• the real action will be not in Congress but in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy.

Democrats will advance their agenda on Obamacare, financial reform and energy

• by means of administrative regulation, such as carbon-emission limits imposed unilaterally by the Environmental Protection Agency.”

That will be the main card for 2011, and what a humdinger it will be. If a conservative Congress attempts to cut back on the agencies, the giant bureaucracy will be fighting for its life. In that capacity it will be formidable. In zero-sum game against the president and the agencies,

• Congress may be the political underdog without allies.

Where will it find them? The only plausible allies that Congress can line up behind it are the states.

• The states are the other separate power in the federal structure.
  

Their stake in the outcome is as great as anyone else’s. At some point in an all-in political conflict, especially when money and authority is concerned, the several states are likely to play a part in proceedings.

• It is unlikely they will watch completely passively from the sidelines.
  

With Washington in a meltdown and a divided capital struggling in unparalleled acrimony, there’s a possibility the states will be drawn in, perhaps through Interstate Compacts, or simply through political persuasion.

• What will they do about ObamaCare, financial reform, and carbon emissions?

What may occur after the Tea Party breaks over the capital is not that the wave will dissipate, but that the impetus will return to to the states and spread downwards from there. If 2010 was the year of the battle for Congress, 2011 may well be the year of the struggle for the grassroots. Act I is about to end. The curtain will soon rise on the second."

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Congress isn't the last venue for Tea Party and Independent voters. We have the states. ed.

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