States Rise Up against Washington - Essay Example

As Washington D.C. continues to come up with laws and regulations to guide the entire nation without engaging in much consultation with the states governments, the state legislators have voiced their disappointed for failing to be included in the process and have done this by introducing bills that seek to nullify some of the national government’s laws and regulations. State regulators claim that the national government has engaged in overregulation and have decided not to sit back and watch.

The year 2014 marks the period when there has been an explosion of bills and this has aggravated the conflict between the national government and state governments further (Wheeler, “States Rise Up”).Due to the fact that federalism involves a nation being ruled by two forms of government or there being power sharing, conflicts are bound to emerge. In the second article, conflict between the national government and state governments over the issue of drug approval is discussed. An example of two terminally ill patients from the state of Massachusetts and who are brothers is given (Ollove, “Right-To-Try”).

The boys suffer from a disease known as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Due to the lack of proper medication, the boys’ conditions have continued to deteriorate. This is despite the fact that the right medication can be made available if the national government revised its drug approval process.In the United States, it takes approximately 5.5 to 10.5 years for a drug to be approved by the FDA (Ollove, “Right-To-Try”). This is rather long especially given that the period is long enough for the health conditions of patients to deteriorate further and for the unfortunate ones, to never make it receive the medication.

This is the reason behind the conflict over right-to-try between state governments and the national government. States such as Missouri, Colorado, and Louisiana have gone as far as passing laws called right-to-try so as to have drugs that are still under trial administered to patients since they could save their lives (Ollove, “Right-To-Try”).