The CP causes constitutional retrogression---that exacerbates every 1AC impact, destroys effective governance, and cascades into authoritarianism.

The United States has one institutional characteristic that is sometimes thought to be a distinctive safeguard against centralizing tyranny: the constitutional diffusion of governmental authority between the national government and the several states, or federalism.368 Federalism is both anointed as democracy’s savior, and also condemned as a handmaiden of local tyrannies.370 The North Carolina election law, for example, provides some cause for the latter concern.371

The existence of subnational entities wielding substantial regulatory authority and possessing considerable regulatory capacity means that states and certain localities will almost certainly play a necessary role in any process of constitutional retrogression—or in the narrative of a failed attempt at such backsliding—at least in terms of the negotiations they force from the federal government.372 But we think it is uncertain ex ante how federalism (or localism) will influence the trajectory of retrogression. It is possible that states will serve as salutary platforms for alternative, antiauthoritarian politicians and coalitions in the manner that Heather Gerken has suggested.373 For many policy areas, states and cities have the power to slow implementation and even nullify federal law.37

Alternatively, it is also possible that a concatenation of state electoral results and policy actions in the voting rights domain in particular will entrench an antidemocratic coalition, and render it nationally unassailable. Patterns of diffusion, whereby policies and institutions adopted in one state can spread to others, need not differentiate between pro and antidemocratic content. One can imagine institutional innovations such as those adopted in North Carolina spreading around the country, creating a series of one-party states. If a sufficient number of states fall into that category, national electoral competition would be severely limited.

It is not, in short, that federalism is irrelevant. Far from it. It is rather that before the fact it is very hard to know whether devolution will accelerate or retard the advent of an authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian regime at the national level. As in so many other areas, the Constitution provides less certain protection than one might have expected.

7. Conclusion

Contrary to what one might assume given the robust celebration of the U.S. Constitution, that document and its common-law glosses have an ambiguous and uncertain relationship to the risk of constitutional retrogression. Many of the key features of constitutional doctrine are not found in the text, which is replete with gaps and ambiguities. This invites selective formalist reinterpretation of the Constitution to advance particular partisan goals. Constitutional rights, usually thought to provide the paradigm set of protections from tyrannical rule, work only at the margin, and are dependent on courts asserting their institutional heft in variable ways across American history. And structural protections, such as federalism or bureaucratic autonomy, may not be robust in the face of steps taken to undermine them.

To reiterate, our claim is not that observation of only one of these mechanisms amounts to constitutional retrogression. Our definition demands substantial backsliding in the quality of electoral competition, rights, and the rule of law simultaneously. Some degree of institutional calcification, partisan entrenchment and manipulation, and exclusionary public-sphere management are likely discernable in most democracies. But it is a mistake to reason that just because some slippage from an (unrealizable) ideal of democratic governance under the rule of law is inevitable, that any amount of slippage is conceptually homologous, or normatively untroubling. Sometimes, a large number of even small quantitative differences add up to qualitative change.