Cooperative Federalism

1351 Words3 Pages

To prevent any branch of the government from gaining concentrated power, the framers of the Constitution designed the system of separated institutions. Since the time of Huey Long, the ability of the system to guard against such concentrations of power has evolved and improved, but this system is still insufficient to guard against the dangers of the concentration of political authority or the seizure of unencumbered political power by populist demagogues.
The constitutional system of separated institutions refers to the constitutional checks and balances by dividing the both the United States federal government and state governments into three branches: the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. The legislative …show more content…

The first type of federalism employed by the United States government was dual federalism based on tenth amendment, which means that the states and the federal government each had distinct responsibilities, and the powers rarely overlapped. In 1945, the United States government employed a different system of federalism known as cooperative federalism. This new system allowed the responsibilities of the state and federal government to be intertwined, and gradually the state governments became dependent on the federal government. Eventually, the federal government gained greater political power, whereas the political power of state governments was weakened, which exhibited an increasing concentration of political authority. The states, therefore, suffered from greater risk of interventions of the federal government, which would be a type of danger imposed by an increasing concentration of political authority. The system of separated institutions were not able to guard against such danger because it only regulated the relationships among governmental branches within the state level or the federal level, rather than the relationship between the federal and state government. Also, analyses can be made to examine other types of political authority, and similar conclusions can …show more content…

When Huey Long served as the Governor of Louisiana, Franklin Roosevelt was the president of the United States. President Roosevelt was criticized for compromising the independence of judiciary as he sought to get the New Deal passed by the Supreme Court. This was the period of time when the President enjoyed greater power. Later in the twentieth century, however, the principle of separation of powers dominated many governmental decisions. For example, in 1952, the Supreme Court rejected President Truman’s attempt to operate the nation’s steel mills based on separation of powers. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act to subordinate the president to the constitutionally granted power of the Congress to declare war. Congress also passed Independent Counsel Act in 1978, which created the Office of Independent Counsel to investigate executive misconduct and report on impeachable offenses to the Congress. These acts were intended to keep executive power under control, based on separation of powers. Therefore, we can conclude that the ability of the system to guard against concentrations of power has improved since the time of Huey

Open Document