Month: February 2025

The United States certainly has infrastructure needs. The American Society of Civil Engineers, serious if somewhat self-interested, rates the nation’s infrastructure a C− in its 2021 report card (ASCE 2021). Some claim there is a multitrillion-dollar “infrastructure deficit,” and others have blamed inadequate public investment in infrastructure for holding back US economic productivity (e.g., Aschauer …

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In many ways, the US system of K–12 education looks to be a case study in the strengths and weaknesses of having a federalist system of governance and finance. Decisions about education are made at all levels of government. And views on the balance of decision making have changed over time. The question that we …

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A word about the title of my paper. It departs rather substantially from the assigned title (“What Ever Happened to Previous Calls for a ‘New Federalism?’”), as well as the prior assumptions with which I began work on this project. That original title fitted comfortably with what might be called a standard historical approach: review …

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Introduction: The proper distribution of state versus federal authority affects nearly every policy domain—from environmental regulation to immigration policy—in American politics today. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the subject of federalism received renewed attention as policymakers across different levels of government jockeyed over the “appropriate” policy response and their inherent authority to carry out that response …

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Long an exemplar of successful political and economic governance, democratic capitalism is facing renewed critiques and challenges, both internal and external. Externally, it is argued that democratic capitalism is in decline, sclerotic, unable to make important decisions quickly enough given internal squabbling and excessive focus on material reward. The argument continues that it will be …

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When the delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, they faced three broad choices regarding the relation of the states to the Union. First, they could create a single consolidated nation along the lines of England or France—perhaps preserving existing state governments as administrative units, perhaps breaking them up …

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Welcome to the Weekly Constitutional, where a judgment or other formal document is taken as a starting point for exploring a matter of law and policy. This week the text is this 2021 judgment of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.  Should a government be able to pick and choose which court orders it will comply …

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Experts agree that the health of U.S. democracy has declined in recent years—but what does that mean? The United States is experiencing two major forms of democratic erosion in its governing institutions: election manipulation and executive overreach. Most obviously, after the 2020 election, the sitting president, despite admitting privately that he had lost, attempted to subvert the results …

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