- [Instructor] In a previous video,
we've introduced ourselves to the idea of federalism
in the United States.
At a high level, you could view it as a contract
between a national government
and the states of which it is made,
but you could also view it as a layered form of government
where you have your local government
and then layered on top of that your state government
and then layered on top of that your national government,
often referred to as the federal government.
And we looked at the example of a layered cake
but have said that over the course of American history,
the layers have gotten more and more mixed,
more like a marbled cake.
And it's been mixed more in the favor of the national
or the federal government,
even though certain powers were historically more associated
with the states, as we will see, there are several levers
that the federal government has used
in order to extend its power into the domain
of what used to be associated with primarily the states.
So one is the notion of categorical grants.
So these are grants for a specific purpose
where the federal government says, hey, states,
we're gonna give you some money,
but you've gotta use this money
in exactly the way that we're telling you.
Now, to be clear, not all grants are categorical grants.
You have things like block grants
where the federal government can give a grant
to a state and say, hey, use this
to generally improve the safety of your citizens.
That would still give a lotta leeway to the states.
But in categorical grants, it's very specific
in terms of how the states are to use that money,
even if historically it was something
where the states had the powers.
So an example of this would be the federal program,
the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC.
And to get a idea of how prescriptive it is,
here is an outline of the program on the USDA website,
a federal government agency.
And if we go down here, you can even see things
like income requirements,
and they'll be income eligibility guidelines.
These are set by the federal government, not by the states.
Along those lines, you also have mandates.
So a mandate is the federal government tying funding
to one thing based on state compliance with another thing.
For example, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act,
which was passed in 1984, ties federal highway funds
to states raising their minimum drinking age to 21.
And I had direct experience with this act
when I was growing up in Louisiana.
Louisiana decided not to comply
by the National Minimum Drinking Age Act,
so the drinking age was 18, but because they didn't comply,
they weren't getting as much federal funding for highways,
and the highways weren't as good as in other states.
So even though the drinking age is something
that might be considered a state power,
the federal government was able to exercise a lot
of influence on most states
by tying what the federal government wanted
to highway funds.
Now, outside of these examples
of the federal government tying state funds
to the states doing what the federal government wants,
the federal government has also made use
of the U.S. Constitution in order to broaden its powers.
In particular, the Commerce Clause, Article I, Section 8.
You might remember, that's the part
where they say the Congress shall have power,
and then they list a bunch of powers,
but one of them, the Commerce Clause,
is to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,
and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.
And the key part of the Commerce Clause is
among the several States.
Over the course of American history,
this ability to regulate interstate commerce,
commerce between states,
the federal government has used that
to justify regulations and laws
that focus on issues that may at first be perceived
as a state power but use the argument
that it affects interstate commerce in order to regulate it.
And as you can imagine,
when you have free-flowing commerce between states,
you have the same currency,
you don't have tariffs between states,
many things that you would traditionally view
as the power of the state, one could argue,
would have some influence on interstate commerce.
One notable example of this would be federal drug laws
where a state could decide to, say, legalize marijuana,
but the federal government can make it pretty difficult
by regulating how is that marijuana transported?
Or where does the cash for that marijuana get deposited?
Does it get deposited in a bank
that has associations with the Federal Reserve
that needs to transfer that money across state lines?
So the Interstate Commerce Clause has more influence
on state affairs than you might initially think.