Federalism

Federalism is the principle of political organization by which a nation contains both a central government and semisovereign states or provincial governments. France has a unitary government— in which all of its subdivisions are created by the national government itself—while a number of nations, including Germany, Australia, and Argentina as well as the United States, are constitutionally organized according to various types of federalism. In Austria and Germany, as in the United States, the constituent political units are called states, whereas in the confederations of Canada and Switzerland, the semisovereign units are called provinces and cantons, respectively.

The Framers of the Constitution in 1787 were well aware of the history of federations and confederations, from the ancient Greek leagues to the Swiss confederated system of government with its cantons. In 1643 the four colonies of Plymouth, Connecticut, New Haven, and Mas-sachusetts had formed an early league called the New England Confederation that dealt with boundary matters and joint military operations, among other things. The early colonies, being far from England, had relatively broad autonomy, so the colonial administrations of the thirteen colonies developed along different lines until in 1763 Britain began centralizing its power by levying new taxes and reforming the governments.

The Articles of Confederation (1781), adopted by the new states toward the end of the Revolutionary War (1775–83), provided for a type of federative system that did not work well. Under the Articles the national government had no power to tax the states, to uniformly regulate commerce among the states—over which they were constantly bickering—or to quickly come to the aid of states in cases of insurrection. When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was convened, the delegates had extensive experience on which to base an improved federal system for the new government of the United States, one that James Madison, called “the Father of the Constitution,” would describe as “a novelty and a compound.” By this he meant that it contained features of a unitary system of government, such as Great Britain’s, with centralized power over the military and foreign affairs, combined with the states’ residual sovereignty regarding such things as civil and criminal law, property laws, and taxation. This federal system is evident in the overall structure of the Constitution itself, but the Tenth Amendment (1791) expresses it best: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” (see Exclusive Powers).

The Constitution’s federalism functions on several levels. The most obvious is the relationship that continues to evolve between the national government and the states. This relationship was not meant to always be cooperative but rather to embody a dynamic tension between the demands of the sovereign national government and the semisovereign state governments. For example, in Mcculloch v. Maryland (1819), the U.S. Supreme Court drew the line by precluding states from taxing instrumentalities of the federal government within their territorial jurisdiction. In U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (1995), the Court declared that the states have no reserve powers over the composition or operations of the national government, which in this case involved imposing term limits on members of Congress. A second level of federalism is the relationship among the states as they vie with each other and the national government for power and resources to satisfy the demands of their governments and citizens. A third level involves each state’s role as “a laboratory” of “social and economic experiments,” as Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941) dubbed it— tinkering with political and legal solutions to problems that all governments often face and making adjustments that can be shared with one another and the national government. At the same time, the states can be proving grounds for political leaders and movements, as reflected in the fact that many governors go on to be president and in concepts such as social security and popular election of senators, which began in the states but later became the national model as well.

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