The American Federal System
The 2000 presidential contest was one of the most
closely divided elections in American history. It took
a month before Americans were sure that Republican
George W. Bush had won the Presidency. In the
meantime, the world watched as the fight for votes in
Florida repeatedly bounced from state to federal
courts and back again. A U.S. Supreme Court
decision finally settled the matter. What many
foreign observers found puzzling was how voting
standards could vary so much from place to place or
how local officials could play such an important role
in a national election.
government, and the state constitutions are the source
of authority for the state governments.
The framers of the Constitution recognized the
potential for conflict between the two levels of
government, and they used several strategies to avoid
it. First, the U.S. Constitution was made supreme
over state constitutions. It included a clause that
declared the actions of the national government
supreme whenever its constitutional use of power
clashed with the states. Also, as part of the campaign
to win ratification of the Constitution, the framers
agreed to support a Bill of Rights, the first ten
amendments, to restrain the national government
from interfering with individual liberties.
Americans also may have been surprised by the
differences in voting procedures from state to state,
but it should not have come as such a shock.
Although few people recognized it at the time, the
drama of the 2000 presidential election was acted out
on a stage created in the U.S. Constitution over 200
years ago. As colonists, the Founding Fathers had
become angry under the authority of the distant
British government.
They had come to view
centralized power as a threat to their rights and
liberties.
The American invention of federalism rested on a
new idea of sovereignty, or the ultimate power to
rule. In English political theory, sovereignty could
not be divided – only one government could have
ultimate power in a country. But in the events leading
up to the American Revolution, the colonists had
argued that, in practice, sovereignty in the American
colonies was divided. The English Parliament, they
argued, controlled all matters relating to the empire
as a whole, but the colonies themselves made laws
that applied within each colony. Americans had
created a new theory of government, one that allowed
ultimate power to be divided between two different
levels of government.
As a result, the major problem facing the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787
was how to restrict the power of the central
government, while still providing it with enough
power to govern a large nation. Dividing power
between two levels of government -- national and
state -- was one of the solutions to this problem. This
system of divided power, known as federalism or the
federal system, is part of the genius of the American
constitution.
After the Revolution, Americans wrote a new
Constitution that formally divided power between the
national government and the states. The Constitution
assigned different roles to the two levels of
government. State and national power could operate
over the same territory and the same people because
they focused on different things -- the states on local
matters, the national government on national
concerns.
Defining federalism
Federalism is a system of shared power between the
state governments and the national government. Most
governments around the world have only one source
of power, the central or national government. The
differences between the two types of governments are
important. In Great Britain, for example, Parliament
has ultimate authority over everything that occurs
within the country.
A study in evolution
The proper balance between national and state
powers is continually debated in American politics. It
cannot be settled, President Woodrow Wilson
observed, "by the opinion of any one generation." In
fact, it is at the heart of the debate between
conservatives and liberals in American politics today.
Should education policy be controlled by the
individual states or from Washington, D.C? Should
each state be allowed to have its own policy on the
legal use of marijuana, or does the federal
government have the power to make marijuana illegal
In the United States, the situation is different. Laws
of the national government, located in Washington,
D.C., apply to all Americans, while laws in each of
the 50 states apply only to residents of those states.
Under the American federal system, the U. S.
Constitution is the source of authority for the national
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in all fifty states?
Is the federal government
responsible for making sure all Americans have
access to healthcare, or is that a responsibility of the
state governments? Many Republicans have argued
that Mitt Romney’s healthcare law was fine for the
state of Massachusetts to implement, but it is an
unconstitutional overreach of federal power when
enacted by the U.S. Congress. We are still debating
all of these questions, and many more.
previously been left to the states were now in the
hands of the federal government.
Later, in the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal economic programs further expanded
federal power in response to the economic crisis of
the Great Depression. Congressional measures paved
the way for federal regulation of agriculture,
minimum wages, labor relations, transportation,
communications, and banking and finance.
In
addition, the federal government began using tax
dollars to put citizens to work, and created Social
Security to take care of Americans in their retirement.
Even a casual reading of the Constitution leaves the
impression that the federal government is responsible
for only a small number of the functions that affect
everyday life. Certainly, this was true in our nation’s
first century. States made almost all of the
governmental decisions that affected the lives of their
citizens. They defined all crimes and punishments,
regulated public health and safety, and set the legal
standards for education, welfare, and morality. Even
today, most of the laws that affect you directly are
state laws.
The New Deal created a large, powerful national
government that the emergencies of World War II
and the Cold War only strengthened. The federal
government now maintained a large standing army
and vast national security service for the first time in
our history. These changes, most Americans agreed,
were necessary to protect the nation from the
growing threat of Soviet communism.
The federal government has, however, expanded its
power steadily over our nation’s history. The Civil
War, fought over the question of slavery, greatly
expanded the power of the national government with
the abolition of slavery and the 14th Amendment
which defined citizenship throughout the nation.
Slavery and citizenship had always been left to the
states before, but with victory in the Civil War, the
federal government took control of these areas to
protect the rights of African Americans. However,
the Civil War did not answer all the questions about
the proper division of power between the national
and state governments
The role of the federal government continued to
expand during the last half of the 20th century. By
the end of the century national power reached almost
every aspect of American life. The effect was perhaps
most apparent in the words most people chose when
asked to identify their citizenship. Throughout most
of the nation's history, a significant number of
citizens identified themselves as a citizen of their
particular state; by the end of the 20th century, most
Americans considered themselves citizens of their
nation first.
Americans have long believed that centralized power
threatens liberty, and they traditionally have feared
the use of power by a distant national government.
Dividing power between two levels of government
was one solution to the problem of how to grant
necessary authority to government without creating
such concentrated power that liberty would suffer.
The states, the level of government closest to the
people, serve to limit the power of the national
government. The idea is that people are willing to
trust a government that they can control, and
Americans feel they can control their state
governments more than their national government.
This belief explains why most Americans continue to
want local control of the institutions that affect their
everyday lives: police, schools, and hospitals, for
example.
In theory and practice, federalism
addresses both local and national needs within a
framework
of
limited
power.
During the last half of the 19th century, the United
States became a manufacturing giant, a development
accompanied by a corresponding rise of large cities,
great concentrations of wealth, and serious social
problems. The rise of unregulated big business in the
late 19th and early 20th century brought problems of
corporations with too much power, which most
Americans found as threatening as a government with
too much power.
No state could effectively deal with the problems
presented by America’s rapidly growing economy.
So the federal government began to assume this
responsibility. By 1887, national legislation emerged
to regulate monopolies. Within twenty years,
Congress had passed laws governing everything from
national lotteries to the liquor trade to the food and
drug industry.
Again, decisions which had
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Mr. Maurer
U.S. Government
Name: _______________________
Date: __________________
Federal System Reading Multiple Choice Questions – Please put your answers in the blanks.
_____ 1. Why does the author begin the passage by discussing the 2000 election?
a. It is the best example of federalism in action in American history.
b. It illustrates the idea of federalism and is an event that most readers will be familiar with.
c. Presidential elections play a key role throughout the passage.
d. The 2000 election caused a major re-evaluation of the federal system in America.
______2. How did the events leading up to the American Revolution help lay the groundwork for the
federal system created in the Constitution?
a. They allowed Americans to imagine a system where sovereignty was divided because that’s the
way the British Empire was actually governed in practice, if not in theory.
b. The British officially adopted a political philosophy that emphasized divided sovereignty.
c. The Declaration of Independence (1776) first outlined the American federal system in response
to these events.
d. Americans knew they had to create a central government that was stronger than the British
government in order to effectively govern the new American nation.
______3. Which of these historical events helped the federal government expand its power?
a. The Civil War
b. The Great Depression
c. World War II
d. all of the above
e. none of the above
_____ 4. According to the passage, the growth in manufacturing and the rise of corporate monopolies in
the late 19th and early 20th century led to expanded federal power because
a. Roosevelt’s New Deal was needed to respond to these changes.
b. the founders had always intended the federal government to take a larger role in the economy
than it had in the early 1800s.
c. a convention of state governments requested the federal government to take an increased role in
the economy.
d. the state governments were not capable of dealing with the problems created by America’s
rapidly growing economy.
_____5. According to the passage, why do Americans want their state and local governments to control
functions like police, schools, and hospitals?
a. Americans feel the national government is incapable of handling these issues.
b. The national government has tried before to handle these functions and failed.
c. Americans feel that state and local governments are more directly controlled by the people.
d. Americans do not prefer to have state and local governments control these functions.
______ 6. In general, which of these best describes what has happened in our federal system over time?
a. The state governments have become more and more powerful, while the federal government
has become less powerful.
b. The federal government has become more and more powerful, while the state governments
have become less and less powerful.
c. The federal government and the state governments have both become less powerful.
d. The relationship between the federal government and the state governments has not changed
significantly.
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