Six months into their term, the 111th Congress is hard at work trampling over the states. Congress is again using the highway reauthorization bill to force states to enact their pet legislation.
Recently, Senators Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., introduced legislation mandating states to enact bans on text messaging and driving, or lose a portion of federal highway funding. Not to be outdone, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently called for a national conference on texting while driving.
Only 14 states have banned texting while driving. The reason many states have rejected these laws is because they have already criminalized distracted driving. If a person is swerving in and out of lanes while driving and talking on a cell phone, combing their hair, or eating a cheeseburger-they will be ticketed. This is just one reason why a number of states have chosen not to enact bans on texting, but unfortunately, if Congress has their say the states will lose the right to make this decision.
It is unfortunate that the federal government continues to coerce states to enact policies by dangling transportation dollars in front of them. This was clearly not Congress’ intent in 1956 when it created the Federal Highway Trust Fund.
In fact, at the time the Trust Fund was created it was only “temporary,” allegedly for a 13-year period to help construct the national highway system. However, like most programs in Washington, D.C., this program now has an infinite life-span.
Congress continues to create more and more requirements for states to receive federal highway funds. To name just a few, Congress currently mandates that states enact seat-belt laws, establish a drinking age of twenty-one, establish a .08 blood alcohol standard for drinking and driving, pay prevailing wages on road construction projects, establish drug-free workplaces, and maintain a problem driver points system.
While some of these may be good laws that states should adopt, do we need or want the federal government constantly preempting our state and local elected officials? And doesn’t this sort of coercion undermine the role of the states and the federal government established by the Founding Fathers?
There is a good reason the Founding Fathers inserted the Tenth Amendment in the Constitution, which reserves to the states all powers not designated to the federal government. They believed state lawmakers were better equipped to create their own laws.
The founders never intended for the Tenth Amendment to be circumvented by using transportation funding to micromanage the states. Even more outrageous is that the very transportation dollars the federal government is threatening to take away from states came from taxpayers in the states paying gas taxes.
In fact, under the current system, the federal government is really only a middleman who collects gas taxes from the states and redistributes them in an uneven manner. A number of states like Arizona and Texas pay more money into the Transportation Trust Fund than they get back.
Issues like texting while driving should be left to state lawmakers. Washington should stop circumventing the Tenth Amendment by coercing states.
The Transportation Trust Fund should be used to improve our roads and not as the federal government’s tool to write state laws. Doesn’t the federal government have enough to worry about already?
Michael Hough is director of the commerce, insurance and economic development and public safety and elections task forces at the American Legislative Exchange Council.
