Hey everybody, welcome. My name is Jared Wagonish. I am a government teacher at Papillion La Vista South High School and today we're going to do a little government.
We're going to talk about one of the most important and fundamental concepts in our government system, which is federalism. All right, we have a federal government system and so today we're going to try to deal with three things. We're going to, at the end of the lesson, hopefully you can tell me what is it? What do we mean when we say what is federalism?
Second thing we're going to look at is some models about like, so how does federalism work? And then the last part that you'll hopefully be able to take with you is like this last part here. So why does it matter?
Why is it that we need to know what federalism is and how does it impact us? After the lesson, we're going to go on with the next thing, a little extension activity where you're going to be able to see like where and how this stuff works in some real life issues that are going on right now. All right. So first thing we want to dig into is what is federalism? OK, so just briefly, the definition of federalism is.
It's a type of government, a system of government, where the power that the government has is distributed or divided between national and state governments. So you can kind of see that over here. When we have a government like ours in the United States, so obviously we have the U.S. government. It controls everything that's going on inside the borders. You can see that with the first little map that I have over here.
The second thing is, though. You may also know that we don't just have like a national government that controls everything inside the U.S. borders. We also have 50 different state governments.
Right. And those are represented by the map over there on the other side. So so really our government in the United States is not just a government, but several different governments. Right.
A national government and then the 50 different state governments. And, you know, you could even talk a little bit about the local governments that operate underneath the state governments. So that's kind of in a nutshell of what federalism is. But I think it's also helpful for you in understanding what federalism is and like, why do we have this? Why did our founders create a system of government like this?
By going into a little context of like way back when our government system was created and what was going on. That kind of gets us in the framers mindset and helps us understand why our system looks the way that it does today. All right.
So let's do a little context here. OK, so so why federalism? So when we talk about federalism in the U.S. government, like I said, it's really helpful to understand how this idea came about for the way that our government is framed. So I'm going to have you think about three different things that went on. So when we talk about federalism, we're talking about the current Constitution.
Before we understand the current Constitution that you can see over there at the far right-hand side of the screen, we really need to understand what happened before that. So you may know a little bit about how the United States became independent as a country, right? At first, we were a colony of Britain, all right?
So I have that marked over there on the far left-hand side. We were the colonies of Great Britain. And we were a colony of Great Britain until we declared independence, Declaration of Independence, in 1776. And so what was going on in Americans'minds during this time period is...
We were ruled by a really power national government that's represented by the guy that I have here, King George. All right. And if you know anything about U.S. history, obviously, we fought a revolutionary war.
We did not like this guy. And, you know, a king is really the representation of probably the strongest national government that you could have. And so right off the bat, when Americans declared independence, they said, OK, for the new government that we're going to have, the one thing we know that we don't want.
is this guy. We do not want a powerful national government. Okay, so in creating the government, they're like, let's do something different.
So we declare independence in 1776. And rather than doing a super powerful national government, they actually go with the opposite. And you may or may not know this, the constitution we have right now actually isn't the first constitution or the first form of government we have. We had another form of government prior to the one that we used right now. Right after independence, we have this thing called the Articles of Confederation.
All right. And so the Articles of Confederation is almost like, you know, if you talk about a romantic relationship, it's almost like a rebound relationship. Right. If you if you break up with somebody and you really don't like them, you want your next relationship, the next person that you're with to be like nothing like that person at all. And that's exactly what we got in the Articles of Confederation.
So 1776, we declare independence and the founders of the country are like, all right, what we know we don't want is national government. National government is bad. National government is just going to end up like with what we had under the king.
So this new government that we create is going to be... what's called a confederation, all right? And a confederation is exactly what I have here. It's basically almost all of the powers lie in the states. The state governments hold almost all the power of the federal government.
Sorry, not the federal government. There wasn't a federal government at the time. They hold almost all the power that the government has. And then like each state is allied with the other.
So it's almost like they're separate countries. that are like loosely together and will have each other's back if they need it and cooperate on a few different things. That's literally what a confederation is. So over here I have a little flag that was circulated around the colonies at the time when they were talking about independence. This is a little bit before the Articles of Confederation happened, but you can see like each little piece of this snake that later on becomes the colonies defending themselves are separate from each other and they're only really loosely affiliated in this thing that we call the Articles of Confederation.
So the first form of government that the United States has is a confederation, really powerful state governments, almost no power for the national government whatsoever. All right, so we have that. And we're not going to get too far into the details.
But there's a lot of problems with this. So one of the major problems is the states can't figure out like, who should help them separate or overcome disagreements that they have. And so because of this and a whole bunch of other problems that, you know, are probably for a different lesson, in 1788, they decide, yeah, okay, the Articles of Confederation, that didn't work. We've got to figure out a way to have both strong state governments and a strong national government. So in 1787, they come up with this new constitution, the one that we have today.
And... it really involves saying, okay, we are going to have state governments. They have a lot of power, but we have to have a national government that can help them with disputes and also has power over the states.
So they come up with our current constitution. And that's what we're going to talk about today. They come up with this federal system that splits power between both state and national governments. It's not a strong national government like we had under the King. It's not a incredibly strong state governments only like we had under the Articles of Confederation.
The federal constitution really splits the difference and gives some power to the states and some power to the national government. Okay, so that's sort of where the idea of federalism came from. Hopefully that helps a little bit with context. And so now what we're going to talk about is like, all right, federalism, how does it actually work? And this is like a really complicated question.
And one of the fun things about this is like, we're still figuring it out. I mean, even more than 250 years later, after our country's founded, we are literally still waiting through what does federalism look like and how does it work? All right.
So one of the things that we can do, because this is such a complicated question and we're always asking new pieces to it, is some political scientists who study this have come up with like two different models to talk about or illustrate what this idea of federalism is. How is power split? between state and national government. Alright, so the first theory about what federalism looks like is this thing called dual federalism. Alright, so let's check dual federalism out.
Alright, so dual federalism when we talk about it, what we mean is powers are divided between national and state governments and each layer of government, each piece of government, the national government has clearly defined roles for it. And then state governments also have clearly defined roles of things that they can do. So maybe think about this as like stay in your lane.
There are things that the national government can and cannot do. And there are things that state governments can and cannot do. That is dual federalism.
The power is split in two different or separate ways between national and state governments. All right. So that's a little bit about dual federalism.
Some scientists... political scientists have come up with another like analogy or illustration that I think is really helpful to talk about this dual federalism is often talked about as this thing that we call layer cake federalism all right so what we mean we say layer cake federalism and layer cake federalism is just it's just another name for dual federalism okay and it's just basically saying like I have here national and state governments have clearly defined and separate powers There is a separation between the national government, which you can see here at the top, we gave them the vanilla layer, and then the state governments, we gave them the bottom layer, the chocolate layer. All right. So let's look at how that works with some real examples. OK, so I want you to think about what are things that the national government can do and only the national government can do.
A lot of these are powers that we say are expressed, which is a fancy way of saying they're literally written down in the Constitution. When you go through the different articles, it says these are the things that the national government can do. So some examples of things that would be expressed powers of the national government would be make treaties. A individual state cannot make its own treaties or relationships with other countries. Declaring war.
We can't have like Michigan declares war against Canada and then Ohio doesn't. Like that's not how it works. Only the national government can declare war. Printing money. This is one of the big problems with the Articles of Confederation is each state had their own currency.
So in our current system, only the national government can print money. Think of how confusing it would be if every time you go to a new state, you had to like get the Iowa currency or get the Missouri currency. And it just, there's one national currency.
Only the national government can print money. And then another one, we're definitely not going to get into all this. This is a totally different lesson for different days.
Regulating interstate commerce. Remember I told you states were having a hard time figuring out who gets to control different rules when they're doing business with each other under the Articles of Confederation. So our constitution says, no, actually the national government, Congress specifically, they get to make rules about things that are traded or business that's done between different states. Okay, so those are powers of the national government and all of those things are only things that the national government can do.
It's clearly laid out in the Constitution. When we talk about state governments, though, state governments have some express powers. There are some things in the Constitution that are like, yeah, this is only stuff that the state government can do.
But like a lot of the powers that state governments really have come to have in modern times are these things that we call reserved powers. And so to understand reserve powers, we have to look at the 10th Amendment. OK, so in the 10th Amendment, it says the power is not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited to it to the states are reserved to the states respectively or to the people.
And so what we're saying here is like if it's not a power that's given to the national government or the Constitution hasn't said that states cannot do it. That is something that the framers of the Constitution are leaving as a state power. So this has become called reserved powers.
There are all of these other things, everything else, that's reserved as something that we want state governments to do. So let's take a look at what that might mean then. All right.
So some things that only state governments do. Running elections, like making rules about when the elections are held and how they're held and do you have to register as a member of a political party? All these different things, those are rules that states make, not the national government.
You may or may not know that. Rules about like just general safety, these are often referred to as like police powers. And we don't necessarily mean like all things that the police are doing, but you know, I don't know, speed limits would be an example or... Lots of different rules about like morality.
There are rules about like when and when you can't buy alcohol, you know, what age you can buy it, all these different things. So these are often have been left up to the states. Maintaining schools.
Actually, most of the laws and funding that go to schools in the United States, schools are under state and local governments. And so this is a huge power and responsibility that state governments have. Obviously, I'm a little biased as a...
as a teacher write about that, but it's, it is really important. And it is something that traditionally the United States has been framed as mostly a state government responsibility and local government making different marriage laws. States tend to, and have over us history made laws about marriage. Like how old do you have to be? And, you know, lots of different things like that.
Okay. So, so now we can kind of see before we get into our next bit of discussion. The different layers, right?
There are things that only the national government can do. We laid those out. And there are things that only a state government can do. And the two don't mix. They are separate.
Stay in your lane. That is layer cake or stay in your layer of the cake. That is layer cake federalism.
Okay, so the next thing that we're going to talk about then is cooperative federalism. All right, so one way that federalism looks is these totally separate levels of government kind of doing their own thing. That's dual federalism. Cooperative federalism looks just a little bit different.
So in cooperative federalism, what we actually say is the powers and responsibilities aren't necessarily separate, but instead they're shared. The stuff that government does. is stuff that both national and state governments are doing. When they want to deal with an issue or something, making a law or policy, they're sharing this power, they're cooperating together to deal with these particular issues.
Right. So for cooperative federalism, I'm actually going to give you two different models. They deal with a lot of the same stuff. But here are kind of two different ways to think of cooperative federalism and how it does and doesn't work. Regardless which model we're talking about, I use the little handshake image over here because I think it's a good illustration of what we're talking about when we talk about cooperative federalism.
What we mean is both the national and state governments are really working together rather than working separately in how they deal with different things. okay it's not that they have separate and clearly defined powers instead often they're working hand in hand all right so the first model of cooperative federalism is marble cake federalism i know lots of cake analogies here that gets a little bit confusing but what what we're saying is instead of that first model that i showed you where it's like well these are things that only the national government can do and these are things that only the state government can do when you really start thinking about things It's actually really hard to come up with examples of things, policies, regulations, issue areas that only the national government can do and only the state government can do. OK, so I'll give you some examples.
But but the reason that we chose a marble cake here is instead of the layers being defined. So we're still representing the national government as like the vanilla flavor. We're still representing the state government as the chocolate flavor.
But what's happening is like. There's no clear separation of who can do what, okay? So we'll walk through a couple examples here. So when we talk about marriage laws, you know, before we said those are traditionally things that only state governments could do. But like, really, we need to say that there's both state and federal components of this.
Each state sets their own individual laws, but the U.S. Supreme Court has given them some restrictions on like, these are things, people, groups that you can't discriminate against when you say... Group, you know, one group can't marry another.
Nope, like you cannot do those things. And that's something that the National Supreme Court has told the states, you get to make whatever marriage laws you want, as long as you're not discriminating against different groups. You can't keep people of separate racial groups from marrying each other.
You can't say that only people of opposite sex relationships can marry each other. Those are limitations on those marriage laws that the national government has set for states. Also in the Constitution, it says that One state has to recognize the laws and marriage licenses of other states.
It's called the full faith and credit clause. All right. So next thing is elections.
Sort of like what we were just talking about. Obviously, states get to make their own rules about how elections work. However, there's a lot of places in the Constitution where it says, yeah, you get to make your own rules about elections, but you cannot say.
that people of a certain race cannot vote. You cannot charge people a poll tax. You cannot keep people of certain gender from not voting. These are all things that are laid out in the national constitution as limits on the states. So we can't just put it in the state layer or national layer.
It has components of both. Lots of different safety laws. So maybe some things you could think about would be like workplace safety laws. There are a lot of those that happen at the state level, but then there's also like federal OSHA standards, right?
Like there are certain things that businesses have to do to protect the safety of their workers. And those are also like federal laws. So we have state regulations and federal regulations dealing with safety issues. The government has done a lot with some different like highway regulations and things like that as well. So, yeah, there are both federal and state components to.
various safety rules. Education, like I said, most of the educational laws and funding come from the state and local level, but we have a U.S. Department of Education, and they have a lot of different rules that are really important for schools, and they also offer funding that are really important for schools. So this is really a mixing of both state and local governments taking action on that.
Right. Different welfare programs. So even though a lot of the funding for welfare programs, unemployment or food stamps or things like that come from the federal government, states are then also adding to those rules and and having their own ways that people qualify for those and also like distributing out the benefits that they get from the federal government. So this is something that that is a mixture of both federal and state governments working. Okay, so that's marble cake federalism.
Do you see how it's different, right? There are very few things that we're putting just clearly as something the national government can do and not the state government, or clearly something that the state government can do, but not the national government. Oftentimes, it's a little bit of both. They're mixed.
All right, the next model of cooperative federalism, then, is this thing that we call picket fence federalism. And it's kind of similar. But basically, we have a picture of a fence over here, right?
And we say the rails that run kind of sideways, we have the national government and the state government. Sometimes when we draw this model, we actually add a third rail that goes through that that's like local governments. And the idea is that national and state governments and national and state level like policymakers, so state legislatures, as well as U.S. Congress people, they tend to work together on particular issue areas. So let me give you a few examples.
Education, we already talked about that a little bit, right? There is a U.S. Department of Education, and then there's also a State Department of Education.
And then if we had a third rail for the local level, there are state school boards as well. So there's different pieces of the national and state government that interact on those particular issues. The economy, there are all kinds of programs, tax programs, programs stimulating business. Programs ensuring that workers get fair pay and things like that.
There are national rules about that and there are state rules about that And there are also local rules about them. Same thing with defense. Obviously, you know, we said declaring war That's a power of the federal government.
Most defense things are from the federal government But like governors tend to control their National Guard troops So that's even an issue that both like national level officials and state level officials are cooperating on and and public health I mean, think about all of the different public health issues. We have a Center for Disease Control here in the United States. That's a federal level issue. We have a federal health and human services department. And then there are also state level health and human service departments.
And then there are also like county level public health departments as well. So we see that when we have the issue, that's the vertical picket. We have components of each level of government operating and cooperating on that particular issue.
So hopefully that makes sense why that's cooperative federalism as well. We're cooperating on particular issues. Okay, so that is basically what federalism is.
We've talked about some specific ways that it works. So what I want to end with then is why does this matter? Like, so what? Who cares, you know, if we have all these different models or abstract ways to think about this thing called federalism?
Like, why does that even matter? Okay, so... So basically what I want to end with is like why it matters is this is how laws are made.
This is how government interacts with you. If we're going to say that government is going to do something or take on a certain issue, we have to first come up with who actually gets to make that policy. Is it a national policy or a state policy? Just saying that a law or policy would be good doesn't necessarily mean that the national government or the state government have the authority to take on that issue. We have to figure out.
who gets to make the policy. And then also we have to figure out like even if they are able to take that issue on, like what can they do and what can't they do. We'll talk about in some other lessons some really interesting debates about this and ways that national and state governments have been able to talk about what the other one can or can't do or what they can or can't do. But I include this image because I think it's a really really important piece to understanding federalism.
Often federalism is like this tug of war. where like the the U.S. government is pulling one way and the state government is pulling another way and they're trying to like fight each other for power which is precisely what the founding fathers like wanted when they created the constitution they don't want um any one government to be able to get too much power they want to create another government that can like level of government that can pull back at them so through U.S. history what can the U.S. government do and what can the state government do which one has more power the fascinating thing is This changes. It's changed throughout history. Oftentimes, we'll go through an era where the national government's getting more and more and more power. It looks like they're going to win the tug-of-war game.
And then state governments figure out, nope, actually, we're pulling back, and we're going to find ways to get power back from the federal government. And so these are things to think about as you hear about new policy issues. Who do you think might be the best one to deal with a certain policy issue? What should they do? Are there limitations to what they should do?
Should it not be just the federal government or state government, but like them both working together? So these are all things that I want you to think about when we talk about federalism. That's kind of what it is in a nutshell.
So what I want to... you to think about now is as we go into our next little bit, our extension activity, make sure that you can do these three things. Tell me what federalism is, how it works, and then why it's important to understand it.
And then in our next little activity that we're going to do, we're going to look at what's going on today and try to find some examples of how do you see cooperative federalism in that? And how do you see dual federalism in that? Which one do you think should be used to deal with what the government can and can't do?
Thanks a lot.