The Politics Industry

6

Laboratories and Principles

In the depths of the Great Depression, the Supreme Court heard a case contesting an Oklahoma law requiring companies to have a license to sell ice. It was an unremarkable legal proceeding and would have soon been forgotten by history were it not for Justice Louis Brandeis’s opining on the benefits of federalism in his dissent. He wrote: “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory.”1

Through individual states, America can experiment with new rules and processes to see what works best, particularly toward our first priority: electoral innovation. In the early twentieth century, the inventiveness of Thomas Edison’s fabled ...