Dual Federalism In The United States

Perhaps the Constitution is one of the greatest accomplishments of the United States of America. The United State’s Constitution was revolutionary to government; it was the first of its kind to actually work. The Constitution did not just appear overnight; it took the effort of many headstrong, liberty-minded people to accomplish the government that we still hold fast to and cherish today. One might consider the Revolutionary Era as the initial start of the Constitutional government that the United States has today. In the eighteenth century, Britain ruled the American Colonies with salutary neglect up until the late 1700s. Starting around the 1760s, Britain imposed and started enforcing taxes on the colonies after the Seven Years War to

Federalism is a “division of powers and functions between the national government and the state governments” (Ginseng). In the U.S.’s case, the Constitution is what divides the shared power between the state and the national government. The amount of power that each has is like a teeter-totter with the Constitution in the middle as the deciding factor. During the first century and a half of the United States, the U.S. practiced Dual Federalism. Dual Federalism is where each government, state and federal, has clear, exclusive control over certain areas, which leads some to call this “layer-cake federalism” since there is a clear line between the two (Christiansen). At its start, the national government did not spend as much as the states, so therefore, it had less power. During the time of the Great Depression, people looked to the national government for help, and President Roosevelt gave it to them in the form of grant-in-aid. This in turn gave the national government more power since they now had a bargaining chip over the state’s heads (Christiansen). This period is referred to as Cooperative Federalism and can be described as a “marble cake” since there are now overlapping areas of policy. Starting in the 1960s was Regulated Federalism. Under Regulated Federalism, Congress would impose regulations on the states, and if the states did not comply, they would lose their federal funding, and Congress also increased

The purpose of the first ten amendments to the Constitution (The Bill of Rights) is to delineate the rights of the American. Initially, it only protected Americans from the national government, but the Fourteenth Amendment made it to where the Bill of Rights applied to the states as well (Christiansen). Civil liberties have expanded greatly through the course of the United State’s history because of the ability for the interpretation of the law to change. Take suffrage for example; when the Constitution was first drafted, the only group that was eligible to vote was propertied white men. With time, other groups have been added to that list so that now the only requirements to vote are to be eighteen years old, be an American citizen, and not be a convicted felon. Another great example of America’s journey with civil liberties is that of the African American. During the country’s beginnings, an African American person was not even considered a person; they were viewed as property. The U.S. has come a long way since then by making them eligible to vote by prohibiting the use of literacy tests and poll taxes, and desegregation in public places including schools by Brown v. Board of Education, but not of that would have been possible without the headstrong, liberty-minded social activists of that time