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The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. There's also the Fourteenth Amendment provision that "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; ... nor deny to any person within the jurisdiction the equal protection of the law." The legal powers of cities and townships are granted to them by the states in which they exist, and they are bound by the constitutional limitations imposed on the states. The application of these principles to this case is blatantly obvious. Didn't the members of this town council ever take a civics course? But having lived in New England for several years, I actually understand why they did it. They weren't thinking, they were reacting. It's just the way they operate there. The feeling of insularity, of self-versus-other, which exists everywhere in New England is palpable, at least to this Oregon boy. It was probably the biggest source of culture shock I had after I moved there, and I never really got over it. It's the main reason I left again and moved someplace more civilized. At each level of organization in the hierarchy of government, the people there think of themselves as being opposed to all the others at that level rather than as being teamed up with them as part of something bigger. The townships in Massachusetts don't think of their neighbors mostly as being friends or allies, they think of them as being enemies. That's why one major highway in the Boston area ends at the Cambridge town line: the city council of Cambridge didn't see any benefit for its own citizens in letting the highway come through; it would only have benefitted the people in other towns, and who gives a shit about them? When I was a kid in Portland, it became obvious that there needed to be a highway bypass put in around downtown Portand. This involved building a new bridge across the Willamette river ("Will-LAMM-et"), but more important is that it required putting a highway with up to 12 lanes through an area full of houses just west of downtown. The benefit was distributed; it was going to be useful equally to nearly everyone who lived in the Portland area and its suburbs. The pain, of course, was concentrated in the people whose homes had to be destroyed. But while they were not happy about it, they accepted their payments for their homes and moved, and the highway was built. That was thirty years ago, and I-405 has drastically decreased the traffic snarl ever since. If they'd tried to do that in Boston, they'd still be fighting the lawsuits. (discussion in progress) |
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