CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUE

Constitutional issue

Constitutional issue

Models of Federalism in America

From the installation of the Constitution in 1789 until the 1930s, the relationship between the national and state governments could be described as dual federalism (Bowman & Kearney, 2009). Each level of government was understood to be supreme within its own sphere of authority. The national government was supreme in such areas as national defense, foreign relations, mail delivery, and customs enforcement. The state government was supreme in such areas as education and law enforcement. This model allowed for a significant amount of state autonomy with the federal structure (Beer, 1993).

An extreme version of state-centered federalism is nullification. John Calhoun was the principal advocate of this idea. This understanding of federalism holds that states—as sovereign political entities—have the authority to ignore that is, nullify, national laws with which the states may disagree. Although not a predominant view, even among those who favored a state-centered interpretation of federalism, the spirit of nullification contributed greatly to the crisis that eventually led to the Civil War (1861-1865).

The Constitutional Convention

There were two main plans under consideration at the Philadelphia convention: the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan. The Virginia Plan was drafted by James Madison. The plan called for the creation of a strong national government. The principal governing body set forth in the Virginia Plan would be a bicameral Congress. The number of representatives each state would have in the Congress would be determined, in effect, by state population. This is a clear rejection of the principle of equal state representation that was embedded in the Articles of Confederation. The New Jersey Plan, proposed by Samuel Patterson, recognized the need for a stronger national government yet maintained the unicameral Congress, with equal representation for each state. As political scientist Martin Diamond (1981) pointed out, the dispute over these plans was not mere bickering between large and small states. Much more was at stake: the legacy of republican theory going back to the ancients (Bryce, 1911).

Although it was widely recognized that the Articles of Confederation were defective, the core dispute was over the appropriate territorial size of a republic. The disagreement over the creation of a national government and the means of representation in the Congress forced the delegates at the convention to confront the very nature of republican government. The popular belief—offered by the political theorist Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws—was that republics could function only in smaller territories. After all, ancient republics had predominantly been city-states. According to those inspired by this line of thinking, a republic could not survive in a large nation, and the new constitution, like the Articles of Confederation, must hold dear to the idea of state-centered sovereignty. As scholar Samuel Beer (1993) observed, however, James Madison set about to turn this argument on its head.

Madison's argument in the convention—which later became famous in written form as “Federalist No. 10”— was that republics were safer in large territories. According to Madison, the chief threat to the ...