The Allstate Insurance Company has commissioned a study by the National Safety Council on the ability of a federal graduated driver’s license requirements law to prevent teen driving deaths. While motor accidents are the leading cause of death among teenagers, and 16-19 year old drivers are four times more likely to crash than older drivers—according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—federal licensing legislation violates the rights of states to govern their own affairs, and represents a solution of subpar problem-solving efficacy.
The proposed law would increase the minimum age of issuance for a learner’s permit to 16, and a full driver’s license would not be granted to anyone less than 18 years of age. The interim would be dedicated to several periods of periodically increased driving privileges, as curfews and rules on numbers of passengers are slowly lifted.
Myriad mourning parents and concerned authoritarians support the bill, citing as incontrovertible proof of its efficacy the reductions in teen driving deaths in states which shore up their licensing requirements. But few states remain without such a program, and many apply restrictions even after their learning periods, some indeed until the driver reaches 18. But the federal requirements are far stricter than any state’s current requirements, and would pull federal highway funds from states that did not comply within three years. The federal government overreaches its power when it coerces states into complying with such laws, and violates the spirit of the Constitution.
Congress may regulate affairs not specifically delegated them under the Constitution only through the Interstate Commerce Clause—and debate continues over the exact meaning of the clause—or through the use of incentives, most often in the form of highway funds. This second method of regulating state affairs has allowed Congress to pass laws in these areas outside their normal jurisdiction, and in this way that they would force states to comply with the new bill.
One could perhaps justify the use of federal funding incentives to leapfrog over Constitutional limitations against federal power in certain cases. Civil rights movements in the 1960s called for federal intervention in the affairs of segregated southern states to protect their rights against Jim Crow laws. And they did: Eisenhower burned a spectacle into the cultural memory when he sent National Guard troops to escort black students into a high school in Alabama.
States’ rights have all but disappeared since the end of the Civil War, when the federal government used Reconstruction to consolidate power and forever close the door on the right of secession. Thus began a trend of ever-increasing federal power and ever-retreating state power that over time neutered state governments and destroyed their ability to self-govern. This coincided with a period of increasingly infringed personal liberty. Today, rights to gun ownership, free speech, and against unreasonable search and seizure and deprivation of rights without due process barely exist. Speaking favorably of a terrorist organization we treat as treason, we can expect to be groped for bombs and heroin at airports, elementary school students find themselves in prison rather than the principal’s office, and the military can detain American citizens arrested on American soil for any period of time without a trial—so long as they take pains to proclaim their prisoner a terrorist. And these restrictions on liberty came not from some authoritarian bent among states—these infringements come almost exclusively from the federal government. The larger size and greater power of the federal government render the expansion of its power far more dangerous than that of the states. Many libertarians have often argued for a national paradigm according greater sovereignty to the states on these grounds.
Further, and this will not be the first time this has been argued, a national licensing standard would fail to take into account the localized needs of specific areas, particularly rural areas where families rely on their children to help tackle the family workload. The obvious solution lies in allowing states to set their own licensing standards. Individual states have the resources to enact reasonable and fair licensing laws for drivers.
Admittedly, the proposed federal requirements provide for far more stringent restrictions on teen driving, which the National Safety Council study showed would prevent a significant number of teen driving deaths. But federal legislation erodes state sovereignty and enhances an already disturbing trend towards increasingly meddlesome federal legislators, who seem convinced that state lawmakers are either malicious or incompetent. The nanny-state approach has eroded liberty in the past, and will do so in the future. A federal licensing law represents a step away from liberty and towards authoritarianism.
