Why does federalism work for the united states

Within certain constraints, states can also enact their own agreements with foreign governments. California's size and wealth, which give it the status of the world's fifth-largest economy, make it an especially powerful player in this context.

A recent illustration occurred after the federal government announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords in In response, California governor Jerry Brown helped launch the U. Since neither agreement is legally binding, they are permissible under the Constitution's Compact Clause.

Individual states can also advocate for their own economic interests abroad, and have the ability to attract investments from around the world. While states like California, Texas, and New York boast some of the largest numbers in terms of jobs created through foreign investments, smaller states like Georgia, along with Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, support hundreds of thousands of domestic jobs this way. To further encourage investment in their jurisdictions, states have opened offices in foreign countries staffed with representatives who are somewhat analogous to U.

According to the Council of State Governments, states began establishing these offices on a large scale during the s and '90s. The council's latest data indicate that today, states maintain around such offices in 30 countries. The most popular location is mainland China, which boasts more than 20 U. While Taiwan may not be able to host official representation from the federal government, it has hosted offices from Florida, Iowa, Missouri, and other states.

On the domestic front, state leaders have used their authority to direct how and whether their residents do business with foreign actors. As of today, 33 states have passed laws that limit their contracting with and investment in companies that boycott Israel.

Such state laws ensure continued economic engagement with a fellow democracy and key U. Finally, any state governor can call on National Guard units that are more powerful than the militaries of many countries. National guardsmen have been deployed abroad for reasons ranging from warfare to disaster relief.

Recently, state Guard units have engaged in efforts to combat the spread of Covid Guam and Hawaii National Guard units held a virtual subject-matter expert exchange on the virus with the Philippines' armed forces last year, while guardsmen from Nebraska and Texas shared best practices for fighting the pandemic with their counterparts in the Czech Republic.

It's not just states that are involved in such matters; America's cities are, too. New York City provides a remarkable example. Through the International Liaison Program established shortly after the September 11th attacks, New York's Police Foundation stations officers in foreign capitals to gather counter-terrorism intelligence.

The city now has 18 police officers stationed abroad, and they can pop up in unexpected places: When a New Yorker ran into trouble in Thailand in and an NYPD officer showed up at his hotel room, he wondered quite naturally how the officer arrived so quickly. America's state and local governments have deep and varied connections abroad. Though they were never meant to serve as appendages of Washington, with some additional direction from federal leaders, our nation's subnational actors can serve as a strategic asset to the United States as it confronts global challenges.

Today's geopolitical environment requires a foreign policy that takes advantage of every tool at our disposal. Federalism should be counted among those tools. America's vertical separation of powers is exceptional among modern nation-states, and stands in especially stark contrast to the top-down model of central planning adopted by America's chief competitor, China. An ambitious foreign-policy agenda built around federalism would involve leveraging states and localities to supplement our national defense, support worldwide vaccination efforts, strengthen democratic institutions abroad, enhance America's global economic competitiveness, and more.

Leaders at the state level are already collaborating with the federal government to advance America's national-security interests and those of its allies. The program is managed by the National Guard Bureau, executed by combatant commands, and sourced by U. A total of 54 American states and territories participate in the program, through which they cooperate with other nations' militaries on everything from leadership development to disaster response.

The program began in , with partnerships between the United States and three Baltic republics. After nearly three decades of collaboration, the SPP has grown to include 89 partner nations. State Guard units have not only built trusted international relationships, they've also increased the effectiveness of America's military partners.

The benefits can be seen most clearly in Europe, and particularly in the Baltic states, which face the continual threat of Russian aggression. America should seek a similar strategy in the Indo-Pacific, where the military balance in the region is shifting precariously toward China.

Building new partnerships and deepening existing ones in the Indo-Pacific would help America create working coalitions to stand against Chinese aggression in the region. This effort would require greater federal funding and likely some improvements to the oversight and management of the SPP, but the return on investment could be significant. It would help smaller states develop their sovereign power and form binding ties with one another.

Better military-to-military relations could also help pave the way for U. A second way federalism can be leveraged as a foreign-policy asset is through vaccine diplomacy. Americans began receiving vaccinations against Covid on a massive scale just under a year after the pandemic reached our shores, and a large majority of America's adult population is now vaccinated. This achievement remains a long way off for the billions of people living in the developing world.

Vaccinating the world's population will be a daunting, multi-year process, but it should be one of America's top foreign-policy priorities. When confronted with the most significant global challenge of the new decade, it was America's unique, multi-layered system of government that created the conditions for subnational actors to step up within their institutional roles and do what was necessary to combat the virus's spread.

America's governors, mayors, local health officials, and business leaders now have substantial on-the-job training in vaccinating large populations against Covid in relatively short order.

Washington should work with these officials to share their vaccine-distribution and public-health communication experiences with other nations. The rollout has not come without hurdles, of course; some states continue to struggle in convincing more of their residents to get the vaccine. But when compared to that of even many highly developed societies, America's vaccination record is excellent. It's tough to deny that the 50 American states have public-health lessons to offer the nearly countries of the world.

In addition to providing reservoirs of vaccine diplomats, states can also serve as key partners in strengthening democratic institutions throughout the world. One possible avenue for them to do so is through the administration of elections. Since American elections are governed largely at the state and local levels, it is our state and local actors, not federal ones, who have the experience and expertise that will be of most use to their foreign counterparts.

The elections in the United States were challenging in unprecedented ways. The presidential election in particular was historically contentious, involving multi-front litigation efforts and resulting in violence at the nation's Capitol. And the whole process took place in the midst of a global pandemic. Yet through it all, America's state and local officials acted with integrity, the judicial system upheld the nation's election laws, and Congress was able to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to count the states' votes.

When America's decentralized systems of voting and adjudication were tested, they proved successful. And they succeeded across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. America's long, unbroken democratic tradition is an exceptional accomplishment in human history.

The institutions and processes that allow it to endure should be of great interest to international observers looking to build and fortify democratic institutions abroad. In fact, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe OSCE already sends observers to the United States to monitor our elections, write reports on their findings, and offer recommendations about how to improve electoral processes. It is important to recognize that the framers did not resolve all of their conflicts.

Nor did they come to successful compromises to settle all of their disagreements. Most notably, the framers did not settle their differences regarding slavery. Instead, the compromises that were put in place to address slavery were done in such a way that the framers could support the Constitution, but without resolving slavery. In this way, this compromise reflects the attitude held by many at the time that slaves were sub-human and deserved no natural rights.

Because the economies and legal structures of southern states were developed around the practice of slavery, prohibiting slavery at the national level would have significantly impacted those states. Therefore, in an effort to maintain their way of life, the representatives of slave-owning states argued for the necessity of state sovereignty. The desire of some southerners to preserve the practice of slaveholding explains a great deal about why federalism was so valued. This trade-off set in place the conditions of political inequality that would lead to the Civil War, nearly 80 years later.

Learn more about congressional elections. However, the preservation of slavery was not the only reason the United States became a federal system. There were two other important reasons why the federal system was adopted. One is that federalism allowed government to more readily protect individual liberties. The other is that federalism created a built-in check on the powers of government.

Since many of the early settlers were drawn to the American colonies in search of greater individual liberties, protecting those liberties was very important to the framers of the Constitution.

To ensure these liberties could not be infringed upon by government, the framers sought to formalize their protection, as outlined in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. They describe all of the things that government cannot do to individuals.

The framers believed that when power is concentrated in a small group of people, it can threaten the liberties of everyone else. For the often indiscriminate preoccupation of national policymakers with the details of local administration is not just wasteful; it can be irresponsible. Let us glance at a small sample of local functions now monitored by federal agencies and courts.

Several of these illustrations may sound farcical, but none is apocryphal. The directives for firefighters, for example, are among the many fastidious standards formulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The pettifogging about where to stand in buses is a Department of Transportation regulation, which, believe it or not, reads as follows:. Tangents like these are baffling. If municipal transit authorities or fire departments cannot be left to decide such particulars, what, if anything, are local governments for?

Surely, most of the matters in question—putting out a fire, taking a bus ride, disciplining a troublemaker in school, removing hazards like asbestos or lead from a school or a house—rarely spill across jurisdictions and so do not justify intervention by a higher order of government. Before Congress acted to rid the Republic of asbestos, the great majority of states already had programs to find and remove the potentially hazardous substance.

Long before the U. Environmental Protection Agency promulgated expensive new rules to curb lead poisoning, state and municipal code enforcement departments were also working to eliminate this danger to the public health. Why the paternalists in Washington cannot resist dabbling in the quotidian tasks that need to be performed by state and local officials would require a lengthy treatise on bureaucratic behavior, congressional politics, and judicial activism.

Suffice it to say that the propensity, whatever its source, poses at least two fundamental problems. The first is that some state and local governments may become sloppier about fulfilling their basic obligations. The Hurricane Katrina debacle revealed how ill-prepared the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana were for a potent tropical storm that could inundate the region.

There were multiple explanations for this error, but one may well have been habitual dependence of state and local officials on direction, and deliverance, by Uncle Sam. In Louisiana, a state that was receiving more federal aid than any other for Army Corps of Engineers projects, the expectation seemed to be that shoring up the local defenses against floods was chiefly the responsibility of Congress and the Corps, and that if the defenses failed, bureaucrats in the Federal Emergency Management Agency would instantly ride to the rescue.

That assumption proved fatal. Relentlessly pressured to spend money on other local projects, and unable to plan centrally for every possible calamity that might occur somewhere in this huge country, the federal government botched its role in the Katrina crisis every step of the way—the flood prevention, the response, and the recovery.

The local authorities in this tragedy should have known better, and taken greater precautions. Apart from creating confusion and complacency in local communities, a second sort of disorder begot by a national government too immersed in their day-to-day minutia is that it may become less mindful of its own paramount priorities.

Consider an obvious one: the security threat presented by Islamic extremism. This should have been the U. The prelude to September 11, was eventful and ominous.

Muslim militants had tried to hijack an airliner and crash it into the Eiffel Tower in Courtesy of Al Qaeda, truck bombings at the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in caused thousands of casualties. And so it went, year after year. What is remarkable was not that the jihadists successfully struck the Twin Towers again in the fall of but that the United States and its allies threw no forceful counterpunches during the preceding decade, and that practically nothing was done to prepare the American people for the epic struggle they would have to wage.

Instead, the Clinton administration and both parties in Congress mostly remained engrossed in domestic issues, no matter how picayune or petty.

Neither of the presidential candidates in the election seemed attentive to the fact that the country and the world were menaced by terrorism. On the day of reckoning, when word reached President George W. Bush that United Airlines flight had slammed into a New York skyscraper, he was busy visiting a second-grade classroom at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida.

The failure was also rooted in a kind of systemic attention deficit disorder. To be sure, the past four years have brought some notable changes.

Controversies of the most local, indeed sub-local, sort—like the case of Terri Schiavo—still make their way to the top, transfixing Congress and even the White House. The sensible way to disencumber the federal government and sharpen its focus is to take federalism seriously—which is to say, desist from fussing with the management of local public schools, municipal staffing practices, sanitation standards, routine criminal justice, family end-of-life disputes, and countless other chores customarily in the ambit of state and local governance.

Engineering such a disengagement on a full scale, however, implies reopening a large and unsettled debate: What are the proper spheres of national and local authority? Policy Brief Ensuring Unity Sometimes nations face a stark choice: allow regions to federate and govern themselves, or risk national dissolution. Related Books. Tense Commandments By Pietro S. Peterson and Daniel Nadler.