States alone avoid fights.

Imagine a world in which your favorite policy proposals are no longer blocked by Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Bernie Sanders, or Ted Cruz. In this world, Washington’s longstanding partisan warfare no longer [stops] paralyzes action on health care, welfare, education, and infrastructure.

Impossible? Not at all. The simple solution is federalism. Rather than watch lawmakers in Washington fight for the right to impose a one-size-fits-all solution on America, we can let state governments, which are closer to the people, tailor local solutions to local problems.

We’ve already seen what happens when Washington calls the shots for everyone. Take health care. Thirty years of partisan fights have raised billions in campaign contributions for both sides, flipped control of Congress in 1994 and again between 2010 and 2014, and brought several high-profile Supreme Court cases. Yet in all this time there have been just two transformational health reforms: the creation of the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003 and the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The ACA then saw a disastrous rollout, followed by a repeal fight that dominated domestic politics for the next decade. Much of the debate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary centered on whether to support Medicare For All—a policy with no chance of passing in Congress anytime soon.

Similar patterns of partisan conflict play out on other issues: welfare, taxes, the minimum wage, transportation, and education. So much fighting for so little progress.

Why does Washington have to decide all these issues for the states? Did Vermont voters elect Bernie Sanders to the Senate to impose his socialist vision on Texas? Did Texas voters send Ted Cruz to Washington to bring conservative policies to Vermont? True, the Framers intended the U.S. Constitution to create a degree of gridlock, but they also wanted to empower state and local governments to provide their own solutions for their populations.

Surveys show that voters trust their governors and mayors to solve problems. A 2016 Gallup poll revealed that 55 percent of respondents preferred power to be concentrated in state governments; 37 percent preferred the federal government. A group of surveys also shows that Americans strongly prefer state and local governments to lead on health insurance (62 percent, versus 38 percent preferring federal leadership), welfare (68/31 percent), unemployment (55/26 percent), education (75/25 percent), pre-kindergarten education (71/25 percent), transportation (78/22 percent), law enforcement (73/20 percent), job training (75/20 percent), housing (83/18 percent), and paving roads (77/9 percent). These preferences reflect the widely shared belief that state and local governments are more competent, fairer, and less wasteful than the federal government.