If the Berkeley City Marina uses any Federal subsidies in their capital or operational budgets, I wonder if the Equal Access Act could be applied in such a way as to negate the local anti-discrimination policy?
Of course, using a Federal law to override a local one is not exactly conservative, is it?
Exactly -- my first thought on reading your suggestion, I had it before I reached the end of the sentence! It isn't exactly condemning the fascizing passions of the Left, to go out and imitate them. Of course, it was amusing to hear them start to chant "Stare decisis!" when the possibility of putting together five conservative votes on the Supreme Court began to loom large with the confirmation of Clarence Thomas. As if the liberals on the Supreme Court had ever done any such thing! "Penumbras" and "interstices", my happy ass!
William F. Buckley, Jr., has written a lot about the ideal of "subsidiarity", which is the idea that local problems should be settled at the local level, and so on. That ideal leaves open somewhat the possibility for debate about whether a given problem is local, state, or national -- if some repercussion can be shown -- which was the preoccupation of the Supreme Court during much of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, when the Court ran riot with laughable stretches of the Commerce Clause to justify Congressional and Executive invasions of Tenth Amendment rights and powers.
So I wouldn't be in favor of using federal law to pimp Berkeley, howbeit that that would be a summarily condign punishment for Leftist weenies who put that blunderbuss in the hands of a conservative Administration. That is why the Left, and especially the Left Media, hated Nixon's guts -- he used their tools, their beautiful Imperial Presidency that the Congress had built for JFK to sit in, to screw them! To me, Nixon was a great if perverse teacher -- he taught us why we shouldn't give presidents sweeping powers, and why their powers should be constitutionally circumscribed, and the office filled with circumspect men who respect the office, the Constitution, and the People. And since I've mentioned Bill Buckley, it's worth mentioning that he has publicly admired the Swiss in this, that their government officials so rarely exhibit the typical pol's hunger for fame and power, that ordinary Swiss citizens would be embarrassed by a request that they name their last four presidents.
Before leaving the point about subsidiarity, I would add that I've read that it's more a Catholic than a conservative, or a constitutional, or even an American idea, though I've never seen substantiation or documentation of that statement. Buckley is the person I most associate with its propagation, and he's a devout Catholic, so it could be true, or not. But subsidiarity would require that the problem be worked out at City Hall level, unless City Hall were violating state law or the California constitution.