Revised Fed Essay

John-Nicholas Furst 9/29/08 Federalism Essay

Federalism is an organization system that can be used as the governing body of a nation. The United States has a federalism system; however it is not the only system available to be used. Federalism is at its heart a mixture of two other popular systems, the unitary system, and the confederate system. Federalism relies on two levels of the government working hand in hand to control and legislate over the same group of people, and body of land. There are two major systems of Federalism, Cooperative Federalism, and Dual Federalism. Dual Federalism in where both levels remain supreme within their spheres, they stack on top of each other; they are known as layer cake federalism. Cooperative federalism is where powers and policies are shared between the states and the federal government, this also spurs the sharing of administration, costs, and blame for programs; cooperative federalism can be considered marble cake. The federalism system promotes Robert Dahl’s ideas of Democracy, because federalism allows states to counterbalance national actions, allow people in each community to follow what their own majorities prefer, and allows for a system that encourages participation of citizens in democratic politics. Federalism permits state governments to counterbalance actions of the national government. The constitution make certain that the central government has supreme power, however it also makes clear that state governments have independent powers, this is clearly outlined in the 10th amendment which states,

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. “ (pg 704, Edwards) This allows the states some control over the policies that rule over its citizens, so that it is not just the federal rules regulating over everyone. This also allows the states some discretion to which policies it wants to