JUST WHEN you think it's safe to turn on the tube again, you hear that Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott is going to appear on Black Entertainment Television, and you ponder what a godsend VCRs and DVDs are.

I missed Lott's interview with Ed Gordon on Monday night but learned he didn't say much new. He insisted that, as a Mississippi good ol' boy, he was just joshing when he said Sen. Strom Thurmond, a one-time State's Rights Party and segregationist presidential candidate, would have made a great president had he been elected in 1948.

No harm meant, Lott insisted. Just trying to humor the old goat when he added that America wouldn't have all these problems today if Strom had been sitting in the White House.

I kept waiting for, pining for, hankering for Lott to elaborate on what those problems were. Because if he had said he was referring to the problem of state's rights vs. the power of a federal government that has be come too big, too intrusive and butts too much into state and local affairs, I might have planted a sloppy one on the guy.

But Lott didn't dare defend states' rights. In a way, you couldn't blame him. For years, Southern politicians used states' rights to defend prac tices that were downright wrong and immoral: slavery, segregation, peonage, the prison farm system, chain gangs, lynching. When the issue of even minimal civil rights came up, segregationists would hide behind the 10th Amendment, which says powers not assigned specifically to the federal government belong either to the states or to the people.

It was segregationists of the Thurmond-George Wallace-Ross Barnett ilk who killed the concept of states' rights. But it might be time to revive it, be cause what we have now is, indeed, to use Lott's word, a problem.

The federal government under President Bush is as large and costly as it was under any Democratic president. Former Vice President Al Gore's sup porters have whined for nearly two years about how Bush "stole" the 2000 election, apparently forgetting that for all practical purposes Gore is sitting in the White House. Perhaps a congressional investigation should be conducted into exactly how the Democrats got Gore to take over Bush's body.

One of Bush's programs is Project Safe Neighborhoods, which allocates $550 million in federal funds for U.S. attorneys to do what state and district attorneys across the country should be doing: prosecuting gun crime. Project Safe Neighborhoods was inspired by Project Exile, a Richmond, Va., program in which felons who use guns are tried in federal, not state, court.

Anyone see a problem with a violation of the 10th Amendment here? Republicans should, but you hear little from them. Many of them support Project Safe Neighborhoods, Project Exile and a growing trend to try state crimes in federal court.

There's a curious racial aspect to the phenomenon, one that liberal black Democrats don't discuss much. When a black defendant's case is moved from a state court in, say, Richmond or Baltimore, to a federal court, the jury pool changes from a predominantly African-American and presumably more liberal one to one that is white and more conservative. Since Lott has been trying for the past week to portray himself as a friend of the Negro, you have to wonder why he didn't advocate a new and improved version of state's rights. Can't you just hear him?

"I was talking about all those black guys who'll get tried by white folks in federal instead of state court. I was trying to help a brother out."

The passion for the federal government as a fix-it-all Big Daddy has effects on the local level. Baltimore prosecutors moved the case of Darrell Brooks, accused in the fire bombing that killed seven members of the Dawson family, from state to federal court because of a lack of resources.

"We would have had to ask one or two prosecutors to shelve their present caseload to try Brooks," said Margaret Burns, spokeswoman for the state's attorney's office in Baltimore. City prosecutors, Burns continued, have twice the caseload they should have. U.S. attorneys have the resources to pay the lab fees that will provide a better prosecution of Brooks.

All city prosecutors who handle gun cases and some of the ones who handle homicide cases are paid through federal grants. When June 30 arrives, Burns said, the city might lose 30 of those because of a loss of federal funds.

That's a problem. It might even be included in what Lott called "all these problems over all these years." Something is clearly wrong with a picture where U.S. attorneys have a wealth of resources while state's attorneys go begging.