Federalism

Federalism. Federalism is the division of governing power between the national and state governments.Advocates of federalism assert that it allows states to experiment with new programs that other states can adopt or modify, protects against tyranny by imposing checks on the national government, and provides the citizens of a diverse nation with a way of governing locally to achieve their distinctive interests while creating a national government to serve truly national purposes. Federalism's critics believe that local diversity is much less important in the modern world than it was in the past, and that a centralized government can encourage experimentation.

Conflicts over federalism have been a recurrent feature of U.S. history. Dividing power appropriately between the states and the nation was one of the central concerns of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Antifederalists feared that a powerful national government might tyrannize the people and displace the important power of self‐government they associated with state government. A key compromise resolved the controversy by giving the national government a list of enumerated powers in the Constitution and state legislatures the power to select senators.

Controversies over federalism in the Antebellum Era frequently arose from the conflict over slavery. Slavery's defenders were concerned that interpreting the Constitution expansively would ultimately authorize Congress to regulate slavery. They therefore opposed nationalist interpretations of Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce, as well as efforts by nationalist politicians to appropriate federal funds for the construction of roads and other elements of the national economic infrastructure.

The national government's reach grew during the Civil War, as it developed the machinery to conduct a large‐scale military conflict. Constitutional theory, however, remained focused on ensuring a federalism that protected state government power. The constitutional amendments adopted after the Civil War authorized Congress to protect the newly freed slaves and individual rights more generally, but in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) the Supreme Court refused to give these new enumerated powers an interpretation that, in the Court's view, would allow Congress to exercise general governmental power.

As corporations operating in many states and internationally gained substantial influence, reformers took the position that the growth of private power made it impossible for any single state to regulate economic activity. From the late 1880s to the Progressive Era, Congress enacted statutes that occupied terrain previously left to state governments. The Supreme Court gradually endorsed this expansion of national power, though often with reluctance.

The New Deal's response to the Great Depression produced a dramatic growth in national power and a displacement of state authority, as most Americans concluded that only the national government could alleviate the national economic disaster. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration developed programs of economic relief and reconstruction on far larger scale than any earlier national efforts. The Supreme Court initially held that these programs invaded areas the Constitution reserved for the states, but in 1937 the Court changed course and held that the national government could, in effect, exercise general governing authority: Congress could enact any program that it believed to be in the public interest, despite the apparent limitations implied by the Constitution's enumeration of powers.

Even after the New Deal, states remained important arenas for the development of innovative policies, but the focus of governing authority had clearly shifted from state capitals to Washington, D.C. Although President Richard M. Nixon articulated a program he called the “New Federalism,” the first real assault on the New Deal–Great Society centralization of power occurred during the Ronald Reagan administration, which sought to reduce the scope of government generally, not simply the reach of national government.

In the mid‐1990s the Supreme Court imposed some modest limits on congressional power. It struck down a federal statute making it a crime to possess guns near schools, saying that the connection between crime and interstate commerce was so tenuous that upholding the statute would imply that Congress could constitutionally pass any statute whatsoever (United States v. Lopez, 1995). The Court also invalidated the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act as beyond Congress's power to protect individual rights under the Fourteenth Amendment (City of Boerne v. Flores, 1997). It protected the institutions of state government in two decisions denying Congress the power to “commandeer” either state legislatures or state executive officials to carry out national policy (New York v. United States, 1992; Printz v. United States, 1997). In 1999 the Court invoked the concept of a state's sovereign immunity from lawsuits seeking damages for copyright infringements and violations of national minimum wage law to expand the constitutional protection afforded state governments. As a group the decisions of the 1990s suggested that the Supreme Court might impose substantial limits on national power, but the decisions could be interpreted to make only modest revisions in the constitutional law developed through the twentieth century.

Even with these new limits on national power, the national government clearly remained vastly more powerful than state governments as the twentieth century ended, and almost certainly more powerful than the Constitution's framers had envisioned.
See also New Deal Era, The; Roads and Turnpikes, Early; States' Rights.

Bibliography

Samuel H. Beer , To Make a Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism, 1993.
Stanley Elkins and and Eric McKitrick , The Age of Federalism, 1993.
Edward Rubin and and Malcolm Feeley , Federalism: Some Notes on a National Neurosis, UCLA Law Review 41 (1994): 903–52.
David L. Shapiro , Federalism: A Dialogue, 1995.

Mark Tushnet