Fed up with the feds

OH, I WISH I WAS in the land of oranges

Old times there are not ... are not ...

All right, so we’ll be needing a different song. A new, catchy anthem, and maybe a flag and some cool slogan that says it all: California, capital of states’ rights.

Not George Wallace “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” states’ rights. That’s so ‘60s. By that, I mean the 1860s.

I mean sticking up for state laws that give people more rights, not fewer. The Bush administration and its business uber alles allies have had a grand time hammering away at state and local laws across the country, laws that dare to give us more protections, rights and liberties than linguini-spined federal laws do.

This very week, a state governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, worked out a pact with the head of a whole country -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- to try to do more about greenhouse gas emissions than the feds are doing. (They could start by trading in their wheels, a Hummer and a Jag, respectively.)

People may joke that such a pact isn’t worth the recycled paper it’s written on, but if Schwarzenegger, constitutionally thwarted from becoming president, is going to act like California’s president anyway, we should use his ambition to our advantage.

“California will not wait,” the governor said, “for our federal government to take strong action on global warming.” And it hasn’t waited, on assault weapons, food labeling, medical marijuana, cleaner cars and air and water. The list goes on and on, or at least it did until the feds came huffing and puffing to blow our California laws down.

The granddaddy of these modern protections, Proposition 65, has been around for 20 years -- an entire generation of consumer education, of warning labels about cancer risks and possible birth defects. Not bans, just warnings.

Since Proposition 65, informed shoppers have effectively cleared California store shelves of dishes and calcium supplements with lead in them -- and it’s not like you can’t buy dishes or calcium supplements anywhere in the length and breadth of California, is it?

For about half of those 20 years, Proposition 65 has been on Capitol Hill Republicans’ hit list. Now, with an administration that preens about protecting the unborn but evidently wants to protect business more, Proposition 65 is back in the cross hairs.

If the Senate follows the House and passes the National Uniformity for Food Act, Proposition 65 and other state and local consumer-safety laws across the country may be as dead as roadkill.

Uniformity for food. It sounds so wonderfully orderly, doesn’t it? But the true moving force behind uniformity is un-informity. Nationalizing food standards means gutting state codes that tell you more about what you eat than the feds require. If you don’t know what’s in there, and you get sick or hurt, you can’t complain or sue because you haven’t got a clue what might have done it.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein has said she and fellow California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer will “use every parliamentary device available to us to stop” the legislation. In April, Schwarzenegger pledged to Feinstein that he’d be battling right there with her “to continue California’s legitimate and rightful role of upholding strong public health and food safety standards.”

The bill’s supporters argue oh-so-unctuously that the nation just can’t have a messy “patchwork” of laws. A patchwork of laws that would make it virtually impossible for the young or the poor to get an abortion? They like those just fine. But a patchwork of laws that might cost some business somewhere an extra paper clip? We can’t have that.

Already, wimpier federal law has trumped California’s sterner standards. Food and Drug Administration regulations have allowed tuna canners to ignore Proposition 65 when it comes to mercury warnings on labels. National financial companies, citing federal laws, sued California and got at least part of the state’s Financial Information Privacy Act thrown out. They said, oh, no, no, no, this isn’t about money; it’s about ironing out a tangle of laws. (Need I tell you that when they say it’s not about money, it’s about money?)

And now, Capitol Hill Republicans want to interfere with minimum wage laws in seven states, including California. Working stiffs earning more than $30 a month in tips would have those tips counted as wages, so their bosses would only have to pay them the difference between the tips and the minimum wage, effectively cutting it to as little as $2.13 an hour. And those Republicans have the nerve to put this in a bill that gives even more tax breaks to dead gajillionaires. I hope some waitress somewhere pours scalding coffee in House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s ample lap.

California can’t secede and become Bear Flag Republic 2.0 -- I’ve already checked into it. But California could lead the charge in a new states’ rights campaign among the many other states that would find their own laws kneecapped by the shamelessly named Food Uniformity Act.

Are you with me? Everybody sing:

Oh, I wish I was in the land of non-genetically modified cotton,

Cuz fed’ral laws, they are so rotten ...