The states strike back : an examination of multistate lawsuits against the federal government
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Around the time of the Constitutional Convention, the states were very diverse places, especially in terms of size. The 1790 Census found that one in five Americans lived in massive Virginia, yet the entire state of nearby Delaware was home to fewer than 60,000 people (US Census 2021). The states were also diverse in terms of language. French was the predominant language in parts of upstate New York, Massachusetts (which encompassed Maine), and the Vermont Republic, which was one year away from joining the US. German was common throughout segments of central Pennsylvania, and English had only recently unseated Dutch as the predominant language in New York City and northern New Jersey (Crawford 1987; O'Keefe 2020). Americans and their states varied across every possible dimension: geography, climate, industry, religion, and economics, and this is to say nothing about political disagreements over representation, slavery, Native Tribes, relations with Europe, and the direction of the country. As the Founders discovered at the Constitutional Convention, the states were too different to be governed together easily. The Founders kept these differences in mind when developing a federalist system. They designed a system where citizens had two simultaneous relationships with two separate governments: one state, and one federal. Among the many principled and practical reasons for a federalist system, chief among them was to preserve liberty (ex: Fed. No. 15-17, 23, 27, 45, and 46). The idea was that federalism would preserve liberty in two primary ways. First, states would have the incentive to protect their own local identities. Second, just as the separation of powers system provides horizontal checks and balances between branches of the national government, the federalist system would provide vertical checks and balances between the states and the federal government. The Constitution grants both governments some unique and some overlapping powers, and a continual ability to check each other (US Constitution Art. I Sec. X, Art. IV Sec. I-IV, Amendment No. 10). The Founders hoped that this arrangement would produce a constant tension between the states and the federal government that would prevent any one government from becoming tyrannical.
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Ph. D.