Federalism

Federalism is the constitutional system that divides power between a national government and the states. The federal government has enumerated powers; the states retain everything not delegated to the national government or prohibited to them.

Federalism is the structural principle of the American constitutional order. The Constitution grants the federal government a specific list of powers, mostly enumerated in Article I, Section 8. The Tenth Amendment reserves all other powers to the states or to the people. This division was a deliberate compromise between those who wanted a strong national government to address the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation and those who feared that a powerful central authority would consume the prerogatives of the states. The framers understood federalism as a structural protection of liberty. James Madison wrote in Federalist 51 that "the different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself." The boundary between federal and state authority has shifted significantly over American history. Before the Civil War, most domestic policy was made at the state level. The amendments that followed the war expanded federal power over civil rights. The New Deal expanded it further into economic regulation. The Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s applied federal authority to areas long left to the states. The Supreme Court has alternately upheld and limited these expansions. Modern federalism debates touch nearly every major policy area in this academy: Medicaid is a federal-state program with significant state discretion; education is primarily a state and local matter with federal influence; the Brady Bill was partly struck down on federalism grounds in Printz v. United States. Both major parties have invoked federalism when convenient and resisted it when not. The underlying structure endures.