States' rights and what's right

Since I've written a bit about Confederate symbols and a lot about federalism, I kept meaning to write a post about Giuliani's "it's for the states to decide" dodge on flying the Confederate flag, but planning for the Hume-Smith conference yesterday took all my time. In the meantime, Mark Kleiman has said exactly what needs to be said (via Matt Yglesias). A procedural point isn't an answer to a substantive question about what the desirable outcome of the process would be.