Evolution Of American Federalism

“We the People” these three seemingly small, insignificant words have held significant meaning for American citizens since 1789, when the Constitution was ratified, but in drastically different ways. The American way of life has expanded in some ways but has been minimized in others. After the United States won their independence from Great Britain, a unitary government, one of the first things we did was establish a government (Ginsberg, Benjamin, et al. 35). Our first Constitution was not the one we live by today, but the Articles of Confederation. This constitution was made with its sole purpose to ensure that the national government would never again have as many powers over the people as Great Britain had over them. Power was given

When the federation first started the states still possessed more power as a whole than the federal government, a large piece of evidence is found in the spending totals throughout the late 1700’s through the 1800’s which shows the amount the states spent far outweighed that of the federal government (Christiansen, Jeffery “Lecture” GOV1113 06). The federal government during this era of federalism, known as dual federalism, was relatively small in terms of power and dealt mainly with national level improvements (i.e. taxes, roads, currency) and foreign affairs, while the states had control over all other matters and the two didn’t intervene with each other much (Christiansen, Jeffery 3.9). Starting in the early 1900’s this changed with president Franklin Roosevelt to cooperative federalism. This new era of federalism was brought on by the broadening of the federal government’s power through a changed understanding of the commerce clause found in Article 1 of the Constitution by the Supreme Court (Ginsberg, Benjamin, et al. 73). The expansion of federal aid through grants also increased the dependency of the state on the federal government causing the aid to switch from a nice bonus to required funds. When the use of federal grants began they were only giving the states 25 billion dollars per year, in 2017 that estimated total has been raised to almost 600 billion dollars (Christiansen,

Why have civil right and liberties remained such as big-ticket topic? History of the United States shows a major gap between what is written and what is practiced (Ginsberg, Benjamin, et al. 96). The first ten amendments to the constitution were made specifically for the protection of American citizen’s rights against the federal government in 1787, (against the wishes of some whom stated to put restraints on “powers which are not granted” could allow for governments to claim more powers than given) though before the civil rights protests of the 1960’s some of these rights were being overlooked. Civil liberties and rights has had a steady push for expansion dating back almost a hundred years before the marches with the ratification of the fourteenth amendment in 1868 which nationalized the bill of rights to safeguard Americans from both the federal and state governments, which translates to mean citizenship rights cannot be abridged by the states either, however congress largely ignored this amendment (Ginsberg, Benjamin, et al. 98 & A24). By 1939, however, the Supreme Court had ruled taking property from citizens without compensation unjust inside states, in addition to protecting freedom of speech, assembly, and