Goldilocks Government (preprint)

ABSTRACT

Those committed to addressing the political and moral crises of the day—voting rights, racial justice, climate change, economic inequality, and the lingering effects of the Covid pandemic—don’t know where to turn. Federal legislative and regulatory pathways are choked off by senators quick to filibuster and by judges eager to strike down agency rules and orders. State pathways, in turn, are compromised by limited capacity, collective action problems, externalities, and scant economies of scale.This Article prescribes a third pathway interstate agreements and compacts. Such arrangements—largely unnecessary when Washington is not pathologically dysfunctional—have a long and venerable constitutional pedigree and provide a legally sound and politically expedient “just-right” solution. Grouping clusters of states along the Pacific Coast Highway, the Amtrak Corridor, and the Rust Belt, we proffer four major compacts as cornerstones of a Blue New Deal. Beyond detailing these four strategic interventions, this Article makes the affirmative, normative case for interstate agreements and compacts playing a regular and prominent role in twenty-first century American governance—a case that sounds in democratic theory, administrative law, and political economy.