In 2010, Plymouth, Conn., was awarded $430,000 for widening sidewalks and related matters near two schools. This money was a portion of the $612 million Congress authorized for five years of the federal Safe Routes to School program intended to fight childhood obesity by encouraging children to burn calories by walking or biking to school. Really.
Fortunately, Plymouth is near Sharon, Conn., home of the Buckley family, whose members, when their gimlet eyes notice nonsense, become elegantly polemical. So, Congress’ Safe Routes silliness inadvertently did something excellent. It helped to provoke James Buckley to write a slender book that, if heeded, would substantially improve American governance.
His late brother Bill, when asked how he found topics for three columns a week, said the world irritated him at least that often. James, 91, who has now been constructively annoyed by Congress, was a U.S. senator (1971-77), then an undersecretary of state, then a judge on the nation’s second-most important court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Now, with his “Saving Congress from Itself: Emancipating the States and Empowering Their People,” he continues the family tradition of standing athwart destructive tendencies shouting “Stop!”
Buckley proposes ending federal grants to state and local governments, a category of spending that has ballooned from $24.1 billion in 1970 to an estimated $640.8 billion in fiscal 2015. Devising such spending, he says, absorbs much of Congress’ time, diverting it from “core national responsibilities” and toward concerns that are properly — he says constitutionally — the concerns of the states.
