The Federal-State Crack-up

Congress itself must start undoing the consequences of its own self-indulgence

By MARIO LOYOLA

For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike have invested heavily in governance schemes that erode the Constitution’s separation of powers and mar its proper functioning. The Federal judiciary has uniformly rubber-stamped these schemes. The consequence has been an unsustainable spree of borrowing, spending and overregulation at the Federal level, cyclical fiscal crises at the state level, and less accountable and less representative government at every level. 

These governance schemes are generally of two kinds: one erodes the separation of powers between Federal and state governments, while the other erodes the separation of powers within the Federal government. In the first category is “cooperative federalism”, whereby the Federal government uses monopoly powers to coerce and subvert the prerogatives of state governments. In the other is Congress’s delegation of vast rule-making authority to administrative agencies. 

These two categories of concern are often treated as being entirely distinct, but they share profound similarities. Both are methods for Congress to escape accountability by hiding its power in other institutions of government. Cooperative federalism allows Congress to hide its power within the decision-making of state governments, while its delegation of rule-making authority allows it to hide its power in the far-flung bureaucracy of the Executive Branch. 

The Federal judiciary has a crucial role to play in maintaining and policing the boundaries of America’s basic institutions of state. It is a role it abdicated when confronted with the popular nationalist programs of the New Deal. The constitutional doctrines the judiciary has invoked to let Congress blur these critical separations of power are deeply flawed as a matter of constitutional law, and they have ultimately become unsustainable as a matter of political economy. Federal courts must begin to enforce a strict separation of powers, both between the Federal and state governments and within the Federal government itself. And Congress itself must start undoing the consequences of its own self-indulgence.