Video transcript
- [Instructor] In a previous video, we've introduced ourselvesto the idea of federalism in the United States. At a high level, you couldview it as a contract between a national government and the states of which it is made, but you could also view it asa layered form of government where you have your local government and then layered on top ofthat your state government and then layered on top ofthat your national government, often referred to asthe federal government. And we looked at theexample of a layered cake but have said that over thecourse of American history, the layers have gottenmore and more mixed, more like a marbled cake. And it's been mixed more inthe favor of the national or the federal government, even though certain powers werehistorically more associated with the states, as we willsee, there are several levers that the federal government has used in order to extend itspower into the domain of what used to be associatedwith primarily the states. So one is the notionof categorical grants. So these are grants for a specific purpose where the federal governmentsays, hey, states, we're gonna give you some money, but you've gotta use this money in exactly the way that we're telling you. Now, to be clear, not allgrants are categorical grants. You have things like block grants where the federalgovernment can give a grant to a state and say, hey, use this to generally improve thesafety of your citizens. That would still give alotta leeway to the states. But in categoricalgrants, it's very specific in terms of how the statesare to use that money, even if historically it was something where the states had the powers. So an example of this wouldbe the federal program, the Special SupplementalNutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC. And to get a idea ofhow prescriptive it is, here is an outline of theprogram on the USDA website, a federal government agency. And if we go down here,you can even see things like income requirements, and they'll be incomeeligibility guidelines. These are set by the federalgovernment, not by the states. Along those lines, you also have mandates. So a mandate is the federalgovernment tying funding to one thing based on statecompliance with another thing. For example, the NationalMinimum Drinking Age Act, which was passed in 1984,ties federal highway funds to states raising theirminimum drinking age to 21. And I had direct experience with this act when I was growing up in Louisiana. Louisiana decided not to comply by the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, so the drinking age was 18,but because they didn't comply, they weren't getting as muchfederal funding for highways, and the highways weren'tas good as in other states. So even though thedrinking age is something that might be considered a state power, the federal governmentwas able to exercise a lot of influence on most states by tying what thefederal government wanted to highway funds. Now, outside of these examples of the federal governmenttying state funds to the states doing what thefederal government wants, the federal government has also made use of the U.S. Constitution inorder to broaden its powers. In particular, the CommerceClause, Article I, Section 8. You might remember, that's the part where they say theCongress shall have power, and then they list a bunch of powers, but one of them, the Commerce Clause, is to regulate Commercewith foreign Nations, and among the several States,and with the Indian Tribes. And the key part of the Commerce Clause is among the several States. Over the course of American history, this ability to regulateinterstate commerce, commerce between states, the federal government has used that to justify regulations and laws that focus on issues thatmay at first be perceived as a state power but use the argument that it affects interstatecommerce in order to regulate it. And as you can imagine, when you have free-flowingcommerce between states, you have the same currency, you don't have tariffs between states, many things that youwould traditionally view as the power of thestate, one could argue, would have some influenceon interstate commerce. One notable example of thiswould be federal drug laws where a state could decideto, say, legalize marijuana, but the federal governmentcan make it pretty difficult by regulating how is thatmarijuana transported? Or where does the cash forthat marijuana get deposited? Does it get deposited in a bank that has associationswith the Federal Reserve that needs to transfer thatmoney across state lines? So the Interstate CommerceClause has more influence on state affairs than youmight initially think.
