The separation of powers into federal, state and municipal and into executive, legislative and judicial is a recognition of reality. Spatial and temporal reality!
That is, there are some issues that are relevant to the entire nation and others that are relevant only to the local domain. To refuse to recognize these differences and try to set up a monolithic governance sets up a governing mode that is rigid, inflexible, unable to adapt to local realities because it refuses to acknowledge them. To instead set up one that is multileveled and has local interests introduces adaptive flexibility and enables a community to react quickly to local issues.
It’s the same with the multileveled modes of governance; each level has different roles and thus, introduces a different function. The judicial, for example, has the role of ensuring stability to a basic infrastructure, the Constitution. The legislature has the role of developing the public capacity for progress, enabling new modes of interaction with modern technologies and modern interests. The executive, in my view, has a lesser role than the current incumbent sees it as having and has, in my view, the role only of overseeing that both the legislative and judicial branches are operating as they legally should – and – providing a general but clear set of goals but not a legislative leadership; that is, he can develop and suggest policies within those clear goals but cannot insist on their passage. Power belongs to Congress, i.e., the people, not to the President.
As for social issues, the Tea Party is right to focus only on the federal govt’s role in goverance, and that role excludes social issues, which are the property of the state.
