Reimagining the American Union challenges readers to imagine an America without state government. No longer a union of arbitrarily constructed states, the country would become a union of its people.
The first book ever to argue for abolishing state government in the US, it exposes state government as the root cause of the gravest threats to American democracy. Some of those threats are baked into the Constitution; others are the product of state legislatures abusing their already-constitutionally-outsized powers through gerrymanders, voter suppression schemes, and other less-publicized manipulations that all too often purposefully target African-American and other minority voters.
Reimagining the American Union goes on to demonstrate how having three levels of legislative bodies (national, state, and local) – and three levels of taxation, bureaucracy, and regulation – wastes taxpayer money and pointlessly burdens the citizenry. Two levels of government – national and local – would do just fine. After debunking the offsetting benefits typically claimed for state government, the book concludes with a portrait of what a new, unitary American republic might look like.
About the author
Stephen H. Legomsky is the John S. Lehmann University Professor Emeritus at the Washington University School of Law. Legomsky has published scholarly books on immigration and refugee law, courts, and constitutional law, as well as a novel and a short story collection. His extensive professional background includes a post in the Obama Administration and other diverse experiences working with federal, state, local, UN, and foreign governments.