Federalism: A Prop, Not a Principle
Federalism: A Prop, Not a Principle
Donald F. Kettl, University of Texas at Austin
Few ideas in American history hold the same position of reverence as federalism. After all, it is part of the Bill of Rights, with the Tenth Amendment pledge that, “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.” Northern and Southern states joined in insisting that the amendment be added before they would vote to ratify the document.
Over the course of the country’s history, however, federalism has not really worked as a principle to guide U.S. government. Instead, it has been a handy prop for politicians to fall back on when it was useful. Along the way, the boundaries between the levels of government have become blurred in ways that the country’s Founders would never recognize.
We made it only to our third president, Thomas Jefferson, before stretching the boundaries of the Tenth Amendment with the admission of Ohio to the union. A special provision of the agreement set aside proceeds from the sale of federal land to support local schools and new roads in the state. There is nothing in the Constitution about federal support of local schools, but the all-purpose clause to “promote the general welfare” in the Constitution’s Preamble provided a ready-made justification for the expansion of the federal government’s role and power.
That makes the basic point: Federalism has always been far more a matter of pragmatism than principle, and it was often a prop in the politics of the time.
This pragmatism allowed the Southern states to insist on states’ rights as a matter of principle, even though it was clearly a tiny fig leaf to cover the national sin of slavery. Afterwards, despite the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and its guarantee of “the equal protection of the laws,” some states followed a “separate but equal” doctrine to facilitate continued discrimination against Black Americans.
That did not change until political values caught up with the law in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case, which ruled that separate, discriminatory schools could never be equal. Even so, fierce, often armed, state resistance to racial integration continued through the 1960s.
Then there was the financial side of the story. President Herbert Hoover relied on the principle of federalism to stand back as unemployment and hunger swept the country during the Great Depression. After all, the Tenth Amendment made relief a state issue. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, however, he decided that the principle got in the way of pragmatism. His New Deal created a massive cash flow to state and local governments with the largest expansion of federal grant programs to that point in history.
In Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the Medicaid program distributed healthcare grants to state governments for the poor. Over the next 60 years, the state share of the program became the largest item in their budgets. Environmental protection expanded through grants and regulations aimed at state governments. In addition, local mass transit systems depended on federal aid.
What could be an inherently more local responsibility than K–12 education? But since the Ohio land grants, the federal government has played a heavy role. Visit a school today and you will find a federal program to expand broadband, federal requirements to prevent discrimination, guidelines for educational strategies, a federal report card on the school’s performance, special programs for disabled students, and support for school lunches. The federal government pays 8 percent of the costs of local schools.
And do not forget the federal government’s role in colleges and universities, dating from the Morrill Land Grant program that was created during the Civil War. That program provided aid so every state could create an institution developing expertise in agriculture and mechanical arts. Just consider the vast network of these institutions, which have provided generations of education for working-class children, including students of color.
And consider, as well, what Saturday afternoons in the fall would be without them. The land-grant colleges field some of the best college football teams in the country.
So where is the basic principle of federalism here? We continue to praise the Tenth Amendment and invoke it as a prop whenever there is a federal program we do not like. But the bright line it attempted to draw dissolved even before the ink was dry on the page of the Constitution.
Federalism is fundamentally a way of sharing power in the U.S. system, a way to channel federal money and power to state and local governments while retaining at least a measure of local control.
Visit any of these programs, however, and you will discover the basic truth: it is impossible to tell who is in charge of what. Federalism is a political animal with administrative legs that does not work at all to serve its original purpose.
