Bill of Rights For Real Life: Federalism

0:01 [Music] the federal government touches the life

0:24 of a young person every day through things like education programs homeland security health care insurance protecting the environment and direct taxation it wasn’t always this way the colonists who declared themselves independent from the English crown didn’t think of themselves as American citizens the way we do today rather they

0:45 thought of themselves as citizens of their home state at the time the Constitution was ratified people did not think of themselves as citizens of the United States so much they more thought of themselves as citizens of say Pennsylvania North Carolina or Virginia this was quite natural at the time

1:05 because almost all government power was held at the state and local levels however ratification of the Constitution would soon result in the controversial transfer of some power from the states to the new federal government before the constitution we had the Articles of Confederation and so the states were really operating as the committee the

1:26 Confederation after the Constitution was ratified we now had a system where we had a central national government as well as the state government so we went from a system of a committee to a system of dual sovereignty two sovereigns simultaneously working in the interests of the people getting from the Articles

1:47 of Confederation to the Constitution was something of a fight initially not all of the states ratified the Constitution indeed it had to be ratified by nine of the thirteen colonies in order for it to take effect and that took some time we think of the Constitution now is sort of a sacred part of the American civil

2:08 faith but it was barely ratified it passed by very narrow margins in New York and Virginia was defeated in North Carolina and Rhode Island imagine the battle between the states and the federal government for various powers as a tug of war first one side gains a few feet than the other the framers of the

2:30 constants anticipated such back-and-forth conflict after all they knew a thing or two about checks and balances and the division of power now think of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause as the rope both sides are pulling on that’s because its meaning has been at the center of the struggle between individual liberty and governmental control it’s under constant

2:52 tension some people think that the Commerce Clause part of the Constitution that gives the Congress the power to regulate business gives the federal government too much power over people’s lives other people think that the federal government should have these broad powers finally imagine there’s a referee who steps in from time to time to pull the rope in one direction or the

3:14 other well that referee is the Supreme Court and half the people pulling on the rope are going to feel slighted in this ongoing war for power this tug of war the Commerce Clause is a part of the United States Constitution that says it is the federal government that has the power to regulate commerce between the

3:36 states in other words it is no longer a function of state power as it had been before the Constitution was ratified and took effect the Commerce Clause was intended to stop the skirmishing that was going on between the states and the back hand dealing by the states with individual foreign governments it was

3:58 intended to create the possibility of a national economy it was not intended to give Congress carte blanche in every arena though the framers didn’t debate so much the commerce power as they did some of the other powers of of Congress because the one thing that those who gathered in Philadelphia agreed upon is that the new government should have the

4:19 should have the authority to regulate the really commercial matters but Supreme Court has become the judge of where to draw the line in the tug-of-war between state and federal power the court has become a magnet of criticism from both sides the Supreme Court came under such attack during the New Deal in the 1930s when President Roosevelt proposed a vast and unprecedented amount

4:42 of new legislation Rosevelt Anna supporters argued that the many laws he proposed were necessary to jumpstart an economy we can buy the Great Depression and were permitted under the Commerce Clause his opponents worried that under Roosevelt the government was expanding much too fast and getting too involved

5:02 in managing and regulating the economy they repeatedly challenged the legality of that legislation in the courts Roosevelt believed the Supreme Court’s rulings were endangering the economic health of the nation in a very serious way but because the Constitution did not allow him to remove Supreme Court justices he came up with an idea if they

5:24 wouldn’t agree with his interpretation of the Commerce Clause he would pack the court with friendly justices who would I will appoint justices who will act as justices and not as legislators if the appointment of such justices can be called packing the court then I say that

5:45 I and with me the vast majority of the American people they were doing just that thing now indeed Roosevelt threatened to add six justices to denying justices on the court in order to get his program through the Supreme Court eventually he didn’t have to do

6:06 that because the court came around on its own this was a constitutional crisis of great proportion but it did in fact get proposed and it was debated in Congress only because its sponsor passed away and because a member of the Supreme Court changed his position at the last

6:26 minute and was a willing to give Congress greater latitude did the court packing scheme fail President Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court had come and gone but the confrontation had a lasting effect on the Supreme Court for 50 years the court interpreted the Commerce Clause broadly and essentially refused to strike down any federal

6:47 legislation for going further than the Commerce Clause allowed this ended in 1995 when the Supreme Court ruled in the Lopez case they struck down a federal law because the Commerce Clause of the Constitution did not give Congress the power to pass it the court said that Congress had overstepped its bounds making a law it

7:08 did not have the right to make in Lopez the Supreme Court considered the gun-free school zones Act and in that law the Congress had decided that someone could not have a gun within a certain distance from a school which sounds like a reasonable policy matter but the question was whether or not

7:28 Congress could regulate the boundaries geographical that are around a school and related to gun use it was a very strange set of concerns for the Congress concerned basically local matter in Congress’s view they defended the act by saying well if you have guns in school

7:49 or around school it’s going to adversely affect the quality of education kids can’t learn properly in schools that have guns and the fear of gun violence and if kids don’t learn properly now they’re not going to be able to participate in the national economy in ten years what the Supreme Court said in Lopez is the Congress did not have the

8:11 authority under the Commerce Clause to regulate individual behavior so closely as to forbid an individual citizen from possessing a gun within 200 feet of a school it wasn’t saying that regulation like that could never happen it said that the federal Congress could not do it to many

8:33 observers this was another historic turning point the court was moving to recapture the original meaning of the Commerce Clause as intended by the founders in the night late 1980s most people assumed that Congress had no meaningful limits that has changed but it has changed very slowly and we are

8:54 still in an era of development I think it’s a good thing that the Commerce Clause is going to be confined to what the framers thought was going to mean rather than what it had come to me and the reason for that is that what it had come to mean was a vast expansion of the federal

9:16 government’s power into just about every aspect of life since 1995 the Supreme Court has struck down other laws when it found Congress had overstepped its authority by mapping out and enforcing the limits of federal power found in the Constitution the Supreme Court protects your liberty as an individual this is

9:36 just what our founding fathers intended for their children for your children and for generations of Americans to come I’m Tim O’Brien you