Federalism
by: Makaela Hopp
Dual Federalism
Dual federalism is the belief that having separate and equally powerful levels of government is best. In the Dred Scott v. Sandford court case, the Supreme Court decided that Congress didn't have the power to prohibit slavery in the territories. This conclusion gave the states more power and the national government less power. John C. Calhoun believed that the states should be able to nullify any acts they did not like. He didn't think that the Supreme Court had the power to pass judgement on whether acts of Congress were constitutionally valid or not. The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution allowed Congress to enact a national income tax and the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution made senators directly elected by the people.
Cooperative Federalism
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal began to bring the United States out of the Great Depression. The New Deal made the different levels of government (local, state, and national) all work together and it also widened the range of things the national government could do. Many people were wary of the New Deal, because they didn't like the idea of the national government being able to do more things. At first the Supreme Court declared most of the New Deal Acts unconstitutional, but eventually, with the persistence of FDR, the decisions were reversed. After the New Deal, the government was more like a marble cake instead of a layer cake. The government became a cooperative federalism where all of the levels of government work together (marble cake) instead of separately (layer cake). The national government also began giving out categorical grants to the states that they could only use for a specific purpose.