1.9 - Federalism in Action

Advantages of Federalism

• Increased political participation: more access points (local, state, federal) means more chances to influence policy. People generally have more power locally than nationally.
• Example: voters who think their state drew unfair election districts can go to federal court. Baker v. Carr (1962) ruled federal courts can hear challenges to how states draw districts, and Shaw v. Reno (1993) let voters challenge a district drawn with race as the only factor.
• Groups that lose at one level can try another. Groups that couldn't get Congress to raise the federal minimum wage have won higher minimum wages in many states and cities.

• Unique policies for unique needs: states can tailor policy to their own situations. (Florida needs hurricane policy, Colorado needs snowstorm policy, neither state should be dictating the other's approach.)

• Policy without national consensus: states can act on issues where the country as a whole disagrees, like how states handled abortion differently after the Supreme Court sent the issue back to them.

• Laboratories of democracy: states can experiment with new policies, and others can watch how it goes before copying it. Classic example: Colorado and Washington legalizing recreational marijuana in 2012, with other states later following once they saw the results.

• Uniformity when needed: for things like foreign policy, the federal government can set one national standard everyone follows.

Disadvantages of Federalism

• Harder to implement unified policy: education policy, for instance, varies wildly by state, making a single federal approach much tougher than in non-federal countries.

• States' rights used to perpetuate discrimination: historically and today, states' rights arguments have sometimes been used to block federal protections for minority groups. This connects back to Madison's point in Federalist No. 10 that minority rights are better protected in a large republic than in smaller ones. Critics argue that invoking states' rights is sometimes really about avoiding federal policies meant to protect minorities.

Limits on National Policymaking

• States carry out national programs: Medicaid is run by the states with a mix of federal and state money. When the Affordable Care Act (2010) tried to make states expand Medicaid, the Supreme Court ruled in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) that Congress couldn't take away a state's existing Medicaid money for refusing. Expansion became optional, and several states chose not to expand.

• Enforcement depends on states: most police officers work for state and local governments. When Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, it was still illegal under federal law, but the national government didn't have the officers to enforce that ban on its own, so state law mostly decided what happened on the ground.

• Congress's powers have limits: after United States v. Lopez (1995) struck down the federal ban on guns in school zones, Congress had to rewrite the law in 1996 so it only covered guns that had moved through interstate commerce.

• Workarounds: to get around these limits, Congress often uses money instead of commands. It can't set a national drinking age directly, so it threatened to cut highway funds from states that didn't raise theirs to 21 (see 1.7).

States' Rights and Devolution

• New Federalism: a shift back toward clearer lines between federal and state responsibilities.

• Devolution: the push to return power to the states, based on the idea that the federal government has grown too big and too involved in areas outside its constitutional authority.

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