Argumentative Essay On Federalism

Federalism is the division of power between the local, state, and national governments. However, it is the level of government that can make a huge difference when it comes to making a certain policy. The Constitution decides the boundaries for the battles over federalism such as the currency have to be uniform throughout the country and no state can print their personal currency. In the past, our nation had dual federalism, also know as layer cake federalism, from1789-1937 where there are limited interactions between the levels of government since the federalism could have been state-centered or nation-centered. Today, there are various types of federalism that this nation has such as cooperative federalism, also known as marble cake federalism,

The act was intended to provide health care coverage to those who were uninsured, which were more than 30 million Americans However, 26 states sued the national government over this law with the argument that it was an unconstitutional overreach of federal power (Hevron 2015). Nonetheless, the standardizing of these provisions across all 50 states were important to ensuring healthcare since millions of Americans would not have been able to get health insurance without national law. Through coercive federalism, the national government uses regulations and etc. to pressure the states to follow the national policy goals, where if they do not they may or may not lose their funds for things such as Medicaid if they do not expand it (Bianco and Canon, 2015). Obamacare has helped millions much more efficiently than each state passing a law that may be somewhat similar in

African Americans were emancipated via the Thirteenth Amendment and were then given the right to vote. However, states, especially southern states, gave an impossible literacy test for African Americans to take and pass in order to be eligible to vote (Hevron, 2015). If the national government passed a legislation to allow African Americans regardless of truly being literate or illiterate, African Americans probably would have been more eligible to vote depending on policy given compared to each individual state’s policy. Another reason is how the Supreme Court, in 1883, overturned the 1875 Civil Rights Act and argued, “the Fourteenth Amendment did not give Congress the power to regulate private conduct,” (Bianco and Canon, 2015). It had only affected the conduct of state governments and left the national government with no power to stop the southern states from implementing state and local laws that headed to the segregation of whites and blacks in the South, which is also known as the Jim Crow Laws, and had denied the numerous basic rights that the African Americans