Heffernan: Bricker and state’s rights
In one of the radio forums the other night, John W. Bricker, Governor of Ohio, contended for the rights and asserted the ability of the states to meet the economic problems of the post-war era. Governor Bricker, an avowed candidate for the Republican nomination for the Presidency, pointed out that the huge debt of the national government, the tremendous cost of administration of the New Deal theories and extension of an already-insupportable parasitic bureaucracy would not only deprive Americans of the liberties they once enjoyed but incapacitate the federal administration, leaving it without ability to meet the situation which will arise when the litigation of the guns has ceased.
On the other hand, said the Governor of Ohio, the states are in the main in a better financial condition to provide the needed remedies and sustain the federal government in the performance of the functions which the necessities of the time may demand.
There is a growing number of people in the United States who are more and more finding themselves in agreement with the fine American statesman, whose gubernatorial activities in the great state of Ohio have set an example of inestimable value. These people realize that the war has taken from us the cream of our young manhood. They feel that it is their obligation to keep for those men now in service the America for whose sake the men in the fighting lines have placed their lives on the altar of sacrifice. And they have the guarantee of his record that John Bricker knows how to administer American constitutional government justly, efficiently and with benefit to all his people.
It was my hope that when events began to favor the Republican Party that party would forget patronage, forget cheap politics and not repeat the Harding mistake of 1920. It was my hope that it would not forget that its noblest exemplar and greatest President summed up all that there is of American democracy in these words:
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The states of the Union are the natural pillars of the federal government. Jefferson so called them long ago. To set up instead of them artificial regional areas, each governed by an appointive satrap of an all-powerful central government, is not to go forward but to go backward to the old systems that have cursed the Old World for generations. Can we not remember that it was Mussolini and Hitler who declared that democracy was dead? Are we to bury it next November?