Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren are all for state autonomy — when the GOP's in charge Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren want states to decide their own marijuana policies. They're big federalism fans — when the GOP's running America.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | Opinion columnist

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If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has delivered a whopping tribute to the constitutional doctrine of federalism.

In a series of tweets, he announced: “Today, I am formally announcing my plan to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level. It’s time we allow states, once and for all, to have the power to decide what works best for them. I have long believed that states should function as their own laboratories of democracy. My bill is a step in the right direction aimed at removing the barriers to state legalization efforts.” —

Schumer was joined by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who said: “The federal government needs to get out of the business of outlawing marijuana. States should make their own decisions about enforcing marijuana laws.”

The hypocrisy of these positions was quickly revealed by journalist John Pitts, who replied, “Now do guns. And abortion.” Schumer and Warren’s interest in federalism would be welcome if it were general and sincere, but it is limited and insincere.

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The idea behind federalism, as the Framers conceived it, was that the federal government should do only a few things that states couldn’t handle well individually, such as national defense, immigration and naturalization, and interstate and foreign commerce. Federal powers to act on those subjects were enumerated in the Constitution, and where the Constitution didn’t enumerate a federal power, the power to regulate (or not) remained with the states. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 45, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite.”

Limiting the federal government’s power paradoxically made it more effective, by keeping it focused on important topics, and also made it less subject to corruption. That's because, since it had power over only a few things, often very visible things, it usually wasn’t worth bribing. And letting states handle most of the regulation meant that they could serve — in a term invented by Justice Louis Brandeis and appropriated by Schumer — as “laboratories of democracy,” experimenting with policies that could be adopted by others if they succeeded and avoided by others if they failed.

Federalism as originally intended also helped protect people’s liberty. If you didn’t like your state’s approach to lawmaking, you could pick up and go somewhere else. (People still do this when states grow too oppressive and when taxes are too high, as the large numbers of people leaving places like California, Illinois and New Jersey for greener pastures indicate). But the traditional variety of federalism has been eroded by the federal government’s expansion to regulate more and more areas that the Framers never intended.

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I very much support the Framers’ kind of federalism. I wish that our political class took it seriously, and that the Supreme Court would enforce the 10th Amendment and the doctrine of enumerated powers much more vigorously. But let’s be honest: This isn’t what Schumer and Warren are talking about.

Their approach is the hypocritical “nationalism when I’m in power, federalism when I’m not” approach that’s far more typical of our political class. I’m absolutely certain that, whenever the Democrats get control of the government again, Schumer and Warren will drop the “laboratories of democracy” talk and go back to telling states to get in line with the policies they favor, or else.

Of course, Republicans are prone to hypocrisy here, too. Heck, back in 2002 I was criticizing George W. Bush for ”fair-weather federalism,” as he abandoned his limited government platform to support a nationwide ban on cloning. And although his brother Jeb ran on a platform of restoring federalism, I doubt he would have delivered in practice.

It’s understandable why the political class doesn’t like the Framers’ version of federalism, because the Framers’ version of federalism was designed to limit the power of the political class. But the rest of us should demand more of it — the real kind, not the phony variety being peddled by Schumer and Warren — because for the rest of us, less power for the political class is an unalloyed good. Especially, I’d add, when you look at the political class we have today.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @instapundit.