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2: The American Federal System

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    129120

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    Learning Objectives

    After you have read this chapter, you should be able to:

    • Explain the purpose of a constitution.
    • Describe how the constitution structures power
    • Compare federal systems with other types that could exist, including confederal and unitary systems.
    • Explain the division of powers and the tension points between the states and the federal government in a federal system.
    • Trace how the relationship between the national and state governments have changed over time.

    The arrival of the COVID-19 virus in the United States in early 2020 did not just impact the national government. It impacted each of the states, cities, counties, and school districts around the nation, if not—in some fashion—every single one of the more than 90,000 local governments spread around the nation. As the virus spread, each of these governments was tasked with formulating a response suited to its jurisdiction, but also in sync with the responses of the governments that adjoined it, as well as those that overlapped it.

    Schools had to determine how best to continue to provide education to their students in a manner that would stop the spread of the virus, many went fully online, as you may know. Counties and cities had to do the same regarding the services they provided. Counties had the added task of ensuring adequate access to hospital care not only to victims of the virus, but to all others as well. Cities, counties and the state had to make decisions about whether businesses and other public gatherings should be limited, or shut down completely. Often the decisions made by one conflicted with the decisions made by others. And the national government was tasked with formulating and implementing a response to the virus itself, encouraging the rapid development of a vaccine, and an equally rapid distribution of it. The elected officials in all of these governing units had to do so under the watchful and critical eyes of the mass public, with the knowledge that any missteps they made could lead to defeat in their next election.

    Screen Shot 2021-09-15 at 10.56.10 PM.png
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The United States and the Texas flags are flown together to represent the sovereign status of each in a federal system. SOURCE: “US and Texas Flags" by CC Rogers. Creative Commons License: Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0). Used by permission.

    Sound confusing? It should, because it is. But such is life in a federal system where responsibility for governance is allocated to institutions on the national, state, and local levels (Figure 2.1). And where those responsibilities vary depending upon which are more suited to need of the nation, state, or locality. However, the more you learn about the specific nature of these relationships, the more they are a bit easier to understand. The purpose of this chapter is to help you make sense of this confusion, because just as pandemics happen, so do a multitude of other unforeseen issues that dominate the news in the near and not so near future.

    This page titled 2: The American Federal System is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Andrew Teas, Kevin Jefferies, Mark W. Shomaker, Penny L. Watson, and Terry Gilmour (panOpen) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.