| Dictionary: states' rights |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: states' rights |
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| US Military Dictionary: states' rights |
The rights and powers held by individual states rather than by the federal government.
See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
| Political Dictionary: states' rights |
The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution states: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ This was a necessary part of the bargain which brought the United States into existence. The Constitution had to be ratified by at least nine of the then thirteen states. The nine had to include at least some Southern states, and therefore there could be no federal condemnation of slavery in the constitution. So on one interpretation, states' rights became, as it has always remained, an issue between the South and the rest of the country (see Calhoun; Lincoln). Since the end of the Civil War, the federal government has become more and more involved in states' spheres of influence. This arose in part from the attempt to enforce civil rights in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution (ratified between 1865 and 1870). However, federal intervention in states' affairs did not increase significantly until the economic pressures of the New Deal. The Thirteenth to Fifteenth Amendments were not enforced until the 1950s.
| US History Encyclopedia: States' Rights |
States' Rights advocates believe that considerable governmental authority should be located in the separate and collective states of the United States. The concept of states' rights arose as an extension of colonial rights, which Americans had claimed when they were still under the British Crown. This idea was essential to the American Revolution and under the Articles of Confederation. When the Federal Constitutional Convention met in 1787, states' rights proponents pressed to include their ideas in the Constitution; others advocated a strong national government, with minimal power residing with the states. The federal system adopted at that convention was a reasonably satisfactory compromise that reconciled state and national power. It included an upper house, the Senate, which provided each state with equal input into the legislative process. In 1791, the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution made the states' rights doctrine more explicit: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." From that time until 1865 the tension between national and state governments as they attempted to define their relationships to each other and to protect their respective powers constituted a major theme in American history. In 1798, the promulgation of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, which protested acts passed by the national Congress, were manifestations of states' rights. The Hartford Convention of 1814, called by New Englanders who disagreed with President James Madison's wartime policies, was another example of states' rightism.
Although various individual states and groups of states from time to time appealed to the principle of states' rights for their political and economic protection, the South is most often associated with the doctrine. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when disputes arose over the tariff, the national bank, public land policies, internal improvement, and the like, southern leaders used arguments based on states' rights in their attempts to protect their economic interests. They usually lost these battles to maintain their economic power, and their appeals to constitutional principle went unheeded. Overriding all the other disputes was the question of the extension of slavery into the American territories. Southern states fell back on the states' rights principle once again when northerners argued that slavery should not extend into new states. Various events of the 1850s, including the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska controversy, the formation of the Republican Party, civil strife in Kansas, the Dred Scott decision and John Brown's raid, and the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860, were closely related to the slavery and states' rights controversies and led directly to the Civil War. That war established the supremacy of the national government and relegated the states to lesser political and economic positions. Disputes arose from time to time about the relationship of the national and state governments, and invariably the national government emerged the victor. In the first half of the twentieth century, southern politicians continued to speak about states' rights, but this was often nothing more than oratory designed to please southern voters.
After midcentury, when the power, size, and authority of the national government became greater and more complex, many Americans began to have misgivings about the shortcomings of a massive government essentially run by bureaucrats. Those politicians who talked about states' rights often found they had more receptive audiences than previously. Controversies over the administration of welfare programs and other social services gave states' rights advocates issues that they could exploit. More important, the cry for states' rights was often a thinly disguised but firm stand against racial integration in regard to education, public accommodations, politics and voting, housing, and jobs—areas that states' righters insisted were within the sphere of the states. When Senator Strom Thurmond, at that time a Democrat opposed to President Harry S. Truman's civil rights legislation, ran as a candidate for president in 1948, his States' Rights Party carried four states and received thirty-nine electoral votes, the third-largest electoral vote for an independent party in U.S. history. But the revival of states' rights arguments in the third quarter of the twentieth century had little basic impact on the general locus of political power. The national government continued to be more powerful, and the states remained in secondary roles. The attempts of the founders of the United States to divide sovereignty between national and state governments laid the basis for many controversies throughout the nation's history, but on the whole the structures of government that they established functioned well. Except for the Civil War, disputes were settled peacefully. Even as the national government gained more power within the limits of the Constitution after the mid-twentieth century, there appeared to be no prospect of a serious revolt over the diminishing rights of the states.
Bibliography
Dew, Charles B. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Frederickson, Kari A. The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Freehling, William W. Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Mason, Alpheus Thomas, ed. The States Rights Debate: Antifederalism and the Constitution. 2d ed. New York, Oxford University Press, 1972.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: states' rights |
In the Early Days of the Union
Immediately after the adoption of the Constitution, controversy arose as to how to interpret the enumerated powers granted the federal government. Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist party favored a broad interpretation, which meant a strong central government deriving its authority from implied as well as express powers contained in the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson and his followers, "strict constructionists," insisted that all powers not specifically granted the federal government be reserved to the states. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, written by Jefferson and James Madison, represent the first formulation of the doctrine of states' rights. The second important manifestation of states' rights occurred in New England among the Federalists in opposition, curiously enough, to Jefferson. His party, while in power, brought about (1803) the Louisiana Purchase, passed the Embargo Act of 1807 and other nonintercourse measures, and later declared war against Great Britain. All of these actions met with resistance in New England, and the War of 1812 finally led to the calling of the Hartford Convention of 1814-15, in which New Englanders officially expressed their hostility to the federal government.
The fight over the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States made the central states-Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ohio in particular-the next defenders of states' rights. The points at issue here were settled in McCulloch v. Maryland by decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, dominated by John Marshall, whose broad interpretation of the Constitution laid the foundations of strong central government. The doctrine was revived in the conflict between the federal government and Georgia as to which had jurisdiction over Native American tribes within Georgia's boundaries, and Georgia for a time defied the federal administration. Even more acute was the situation that developed in South Carolina in opposition to the tariff acts of 1828 and 1832, when, under the leadership of John C. Calhoun, South Carolina passed its ordinance of nullification. Calhoun's doctrine of absolute state sovereignty was the most extreme of states' rights theories.
A Justification for Secession
Although proslavery forces are usually identified with a strong states' rights position, the legislature of Wisconsin adopted (1859) resolutions defending state sovereignty after the Supreme Court overruled the Wisconsin courts and upheld the conviction of an abolitionist editor for violating the fugitive slave law. Ultimately the proslavery states used states' rights doctrines to justify their secession. Eleven Southern states seceded in 1860-61 and formed the Confederacy, in which, fittingly, the doctrine of states' rights was upheld by such governors as Joseph E. Brown and Zebulon B. Vance. This undoubtedly contributed to the Confederate defeat in the Civil War, just as the disposition of some of the Thirteen Colonies to act in complete independence of the Continental Congress had hampered the American Revolution.
In the Twentieth Century
Although the Union victory in the Civil War definitively ended the possibility of nullification and secession, the states' rights doctrine did not die. In the second half of the 20th cent. it was vigorously revived by Southern opponents of the federal civil-rights program. In the presidential election of 1948, a Southern states' rights party (the Dixiecrats) was organized with J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as its candidate, and it carried four Southern states. The desegregation controversy of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s engendered many states' rights statements by Southern political leaders such as Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama. In 1962, federal troops were used at the Univ. of Mississippi to enforce a federal court ruling that ordered the admission of a black student to the university. Although the doctrine of states' rights is usually associated with the Southern wing of the Democratic party, it is not exclusive to any particular section or political party. The vast increase in the powers of the federal government at the expense of the states, resulting from the incapacity of the states to deal with the complex problems of modern industrial civilization, has led to renewed interest in states' rights. In the 1980s and 90s, states' rights proponents, under the banner of "federalism" or "the New Federalism," attacked the great increase in federal government powers that had occurred since the New Deal. On taking power of both houses of Congress in the 1994 elections, conservative Republicans proclaimed the beginning of a process of "devolution," with much power reverting to the states; several years later, however, it was clear that reality had not met this prediction. State sovereignty has been affirmed and expanded, however, by recent, often narrowly decided, decisions of the Supreme Court.
Bibliography
See C. Warren, The Supreme Court and Sovereign States (1924); F. L. Owsley, State Rights in the Confederacy (1925, repr. 1961); A. T. Mason, The States Rights Debate (2d ed. 1972); R. E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States' Rights and the Nullification Crisis (1987); F. McDonald, States' Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776-1876 (2001).
| Law Encyclopedia: States' Rights |
A doctrine and strategy in which the rights of the individual states are protected by the U.S. Constitution from interference by the federal government.
The history of the United States has been marked by conflict over the proper allocation of power between the states and the federal government. The federal system of government established by the U.S. Constitution recognized the sovereignty of both the state governments and the federal government by giving them mutually exclusive powers as well as concurrent powers. In the first half of the nineteenth century, arguments over states' rights arose in the context of slavery. From the 1870s to the 1930s, economic issues shaped the debate. In the 1950s racial segregation and the civil rights movement renewed the issue of state power. By the 1970s economic and political conservatives had begun to call for a reduction in the power and control of the federal government and for the redistribution of responsibilities to the states.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the delegates represented state governments that had become autonomous centers of power. The Constitution avoided a precise definition of the locus of sovereignty, leaving people to infer that the new charter created a divided structure in which powers were allocated between the central government and the states in such a way that each would be supreme in certain areas.
Nevertheless, defenders of states' rights were concerned that a powerful, consolidated national government would run roughshod over the states. With ratification of the Constitution in doubt, the Framers promised to add protection for the states. Accordingly, the Tenth Amendment was added to the Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment stipulates that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." This amendment became the constitutional foundation for those who wish to promote the rights and powers of the states vis-`-vis the federal government.
In the early years of the Republic, states' rights were vigorously protected. An early ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court challenging state control of property rights, Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 1 L. Ed. 440 (1793), was promptly overruled by states' rights advocates with the passage of the Eleventh Amendment, which limits the rights of persons to sue a state in federal court.
The passage by the Federalists of the Alien Enemies and Sedition Acts of 1798 (1 Stat. 570, 1 Stat. 596), which restricted a number of personal liberties, provoked an impassioned response from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In proposing the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, Jefferson went so far as to argue that the "sovereign and independent states" had the right to "interpose" themselves between their citizens and improper national legislative actions and to "nullify" acts of Congress they deemed unconstitutional. This was the origin of the doctrines of nullification and interposition, later employed by New England states during the War of 1812 and by South Carolina in opposing federal tariff legislation in 1832.
From 1815 until the end of the Civil War in 1865, states' rights played a major role in the U.S. political process. The doctrine was most fully articulated in the writings of the South Carolina statesman and political theorist John C. Calhoun. Calhoun's theory included the right of states to dissolve their contractual relationship with the federal government rather than submit to policies they saw as destructive to their local self-interests. By linking states' rights to slavery, Calhoun later helped to turn the concept into a defensive mechanism for protecting the "peculiar institution." Calhoun himself sought to go further and impose upon the federal government, in its capacity as agent for the sovereign states, a positive responsibility for protecting slavery. Thus, Calhoun sought to transform states' rights into an aggressive instrument for the protection of regional interests.\
Northern leaders were also prepared to manipulate the concept. As early as the 1820s, Northern legislatures enacted personal liberty laws as devices to block the enforcement of the federal fugitive slave law. Although such laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. (16 Pet.) 539, 10 L. Ed. 1060 (1842), the enactment of the more stringent Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by Congress led to a wave of reenactments of personal liberty laws in the North and a general defiance of federal fugitive slave policy based upon states' rights arguments.
The defeat of the South in the Civil War ended the dispute. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were aimed in part at preventing the states from denying certain basic rights to U.S. citizens. Although the Supreme Court substantially restricted the power of these amendments during the late nineteenth century, it did so only indirectly, relying on states' rights arguments to justify its actions. Behind a judicial philosophy that supported the decisions was laissez-faire capitalism. Thus, the Court would invoke the Tenth Amendment to strike down federal laws that were characterized as hostile to state interests and then use the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state legislation that sought to regulate business, labor, and the economy.
This trend continued into the twentieth century. Until the 1930s the Court frequently used the Tenth Amendment as a device for striking down federal measures, from child labor laws to major pieces of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation. Hundreds of state regulatory statutes were also overturned. Only when the states sought to restrict unions or control dissenters did the Court sustain these efforts.
In the late 1930s, however, the Court shifted course and abandoned its hard-line position on federal power. The New Deal dramatically increased the size and power of the federal government. States' rights arguments against overextensive use of the Commerce Clause or the power to tax for the general welfare fell in the face of pressing national economic needs. By the end of World War II, the federal government had become the dominant power in the federal system.
States' rights were revived in the late 1940s over the matter of race. In 1948 President Harry S Truman pushed for a more aggressive civil rights policy. Southern "Dixiecrats" bolted the Democratic party and ran their own candidate, J. Strom Thurmond, on a "states' rights" platform calling for continued racial segregation and denouncing proposals for national action in behalf of civil rights. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954), which ruled that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional, met with Southern resistance. Segregationists turned again to interposition, developing programs of massive resistance to racial integration in public education, public facilities, housing, and access to jobs.
Beginning in the 1960s, other states' rights proponents started stressing the need for local control of government. Opposition to federal welfare and subsidy programs was based on a concern that along with federal money would come federal control, which would be deleterious to the maintenance of local standards and inappropriate for unique local conditions.
By the mid-1970s, the Supreme Court and the body politic had become concerned about federal power. In National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U.S. 833, 96 S. Ct. 2465, 49 L. Ed. 2d 245 (1976), the Court ruled that Congress had exceeded its power to regulate interstate commerce when it extended federal minimum wage and overtime standards to state and local governments. Determination of state government employees' wages and hours is one of the "attributes of sovereignty attaching to every state government," attributes that "may not be impaired by Congress." Less than ten years later, however, the Court overruled National League in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U.S. 528, 105 S. Ct. 1005, 83 L. Ed. 2d 1016 (1985). Nevertheless, the 5-4 majority in Garcia and the Court's difficulty in articulating a coherent Tenth Amendment jurisprudence have left this area of states' rights muddled.
In the political arena, however, the conservative philosophy of President Ronald Reagan reinvigorated the states' rights movement. The 1980s saw a major shift in how the federal government was perceived. For the Reagan administration and political conservatives, reducing the size and power of the federal government became a top priority.
Though the size of government did not shrink substantially during the 1980s, states were given more authority to experiment with policy and initiatives that had previously been directed from Washington. The 1994 congressional elections, which resulted in the first Republican-controlled House of Representatives since 1948, appeared to signal a major change in the electorate's views about state-federal relations. Although little of the Republicans' "Contract with America" platform was enacted, many of its most ardent supporters enunciated states' rights arguments.
See: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas; Federalism; Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Prigg v. Pennsylvania.
| Politics: states' rights |
Rights guaranteed to the states under the principle of federalism. Under the Constitution, states have considerable autonomy to pass, enforce, and interpret their own laws and to pursue their own public policy programs. Proponents of states' rights argue that the states should be governed with a minimum of interference from the federal government.
| Wikipedia: States' rights |
States' rights in U.S. politics refers to the political powers that U.S. states possess in relation to the federal government, as guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
Contents |
The balance of federal powers and those powers held by the states as defined in the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution was first addressed in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland. Chief Justice John Marshall asserted that the laws adopted by the federal government, when exercising its constitutional powers, are generally paramount over any conflicting laws adopted by state governments. After McCulloch, the primary legal issues in this area concerned the scope of Congress' constitutional powers, and whether the states possess certain powers to the exclusion of the federal government, even if the Constitution does not explicitly limit them to the States.[citation needed]
In the period between the American Revolution and the ratification of the United States Constitution, the states had united under a much weaker federal government, pursuant to the Articles of Confederation. The Articles gave the central government very little, if any, authority to overrule individual state actions. The Constitution subsequently strengthened the central government, authorizing it to exercise powers deemed necessary to exercise its authority, with an ambiguous boundary between the two co-existing levels of government. In the event of any conflict between state and federal law, the Constitution resolved the conflict[citation needed] via the Supremacy Clause of Article VI in favor of the federal government, which declares federal law the "supreme Law of the Land" and provides that "the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." However, the Supremacy Clause only applies if the federal government is acting in pursuit of its constitutionally authorized powers.
When the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which provide a classic statement in support of states' rights. According to this theory, the federal Union is a voluntary association of states, and if the central government goes too far each state has the right to nullify that law. As Jefferson said in the Kentucky Resolutions:
Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party....each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.
The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, along with the supporting Report of 1800 by Madison, became bedrock documents of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. The most vociferous supporters of states' rights, such as John Randolph of Roanoke, were called "Old Republicans" into the 1820s and 1830s.
Another states' rights dispute occurred over the War of 1812. At the Hartford Convention, New England states voiced opposition to President James Madison and the war, and discussed secession from the Union.
One major and continuous strain on the union, from roughly 1820 through the Civil War, was the issue of trade and tariffs. Heavily dependent upon trade, the almost entirely agricultural and export-oriented South imported most of its manufactured goods from Europe or obtained them from the North. The North, by contrast, had a growing domestic industrial economy that viewed foreign trade as competition. Trade barriers, especially protective tariffs, were viewed as harmful to the Southern economy, which depended on exports.
In 1828, the Congress passed protective tariffs to benefit trade in the northern states, but that were detrimental to the South. Southerners vocally expressed their tariff opposition in documents such as the South Carolina Exposition and Protest in 1828, written in response to the "Tariff of Abominations." Exposition and Protest was the work of South Carolina senator and former vice president John C. Calhoun, formerly an advocate of protective tariffs and internal improvements at federal expense.
South Carolina's Nullification Ordinance declared both the tariff of 1828 and the 1832 null and void within the state borders of South Carolina. This action initiated the Nullification Crisis. Passed by a state convention on November 24, 1832, it led, on December 10, to President Andrew Jackson's proclamation against South Carolina, which sent a naval flotilla and a threat of sending federal troops to enforce the tariffs.
Over the following decades, another central dispute over states' rights moved to the forefront. The issue of slavery polarized the union, with the Jeffersonian principles often being used by both sides—anti-slavery Northerners, and Southern slaveholders and secessionists—in debates that ultimately led to the American Civil War. Supporters of slavery often argued that one of the rights of the states was the protection of slave property wherever it went, a position endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1857 Dred Scott decision. In contrast, opponents of slavery argued that the non-slave-states' rights were violated both by that decision and by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Exactly which—and whose—states' rights were the casus belli in the Civil War remain in controversy.
Jefferson Davis used the following argument in favor of the equal rights of states:
Resolved, That the union of these States rests on the equality of rights and privileges among its members, and that it is especially the duty of the Senate, which represents the States in their sovereign capacity, to resist all attempts to discriminate either in relation to person or property, so as, in the Territories—which are the common possession of the United States—to give advantages to the citizens of one State which are not equally secured to those of every other State.[1]
The Preamble to the Confederate States Constitution begins: "We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character..."
The historian James McPherson[2] noted that Southerners were inconsistent on the states' rights issue, and that Northern states tried to protect the rights of their states against the South during the Gag Rule and fugitive slave law controversies. The historian William H. Freehling[3] noted that the South's argument for a states' rights to secede was different from Thomas Jefferson's, in that Jefferson based such a right on the unalianable equal rights of man. The South's version of such a right was modified to be consistent with slavery, and with the South's blend of democracy and authoritarianism.[3] Various historians and commentators, including Adams[4], Sinha[5], and Richards[6], among others, are of the opinion that the States' Rights argument made by supporters of the Confederacy was in fact a thinly disguised justification of continued slavery in the southern states, and/or moves by the Southern states to violate the states' rights of Northern states.
Historian Henry Brooks Adams explains that the anti-slavery North took a consistent and principled stand on states' rights against Federal encroachment throughout its history, while the Southern states, whenever they saw an opportunity to expand slavery and the reach of the slave power, often conveniently forgot the principle of states' rights—and fought in favor of Federal centralization:
Between the slave power and states' rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states' rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas "by joint resolution" [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision — all triumphs of the slave power — did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states' rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states' rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.[4]
Sinha[5] and Richards[6] both argue that the states' rights that the Southern states claimed were actually:
| "Historians, like contemporaries, have long noted that an overwhelming majority of South Carolinians were for secession. But a majority of South Carolinians had nothing to do with secession or the glorification of human bondage. A majority of South Carolinians in 1860 were slaves." |
Sinha and Richards conclude their cases by arguing that the Civil War had nothing to do with "states' rights", democracy, or resistance to arbitrary power. They argue that it was instead the result of the increasing cognitive dissonance in the minds of Northerners and (some) Southern non-slaveowners between the ideals that the United States was founded upon and identified itself as standing for, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, and the reality that the slave-power represented, as what they describe as an anti-democratic, counter-republican, oligarchic, despotic, authoritarian, if not totalitarian, movement for ownership of human beings as the personal chattels of the slaver. As this cognitive dissonance increased, the people of the Northern states, and the Northern states themselves, became increasingly inclined to resist the encroachments of the slave power upon their states' rights and encroachments of the slave power by and upon the Federal Government of the United States. The slave power, having failed to maintain its dominance of the Federal Government through democratic means, sought other means of maintaining its dominance of the Federal Government, by means of military aggression, by right of force and coercion, and thus, the Civil War occurred.
A series of Supreme Court decisions developed the state action constraint on the Equal Protection Clause. The state action theory weakened the effect of the Equal Protection Clause against state governments, in that the clause was held not to apply to unequal protection of the laws caused in part by complete lack of state action in specific cases, even if state actions in other instances form an overall pattern of segregation and other discrimination. The separate but equal theory further weakened the effect of the Equal Protection Clause against state governments.
With United States v. Cruikshank (1876), a case which arose out of the Colfax Massacre of blacks contesting the results of a Reconstruction era election, the Fourteenth Amendment, First Amendment and Second Amendment were held by the Supreme Court to apply only to state actions, not private acts of violence.
United States v. Harris (1883) held that the Equal Protection Clause did not apply to an 1883 prison lynching since the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to states, not to individual criminal matters.
The Civil Rights Cases (1883) allowed segregation by striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a statute that prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations. There, the Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause applied only to acts done by states, not to those done by private individuals; because the Civil Rights Act of 1875 applied to private establishments, the Court said, it exceeded congressional power under Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) held that the separate but equal doctrine complied with the Equal Protection Clause, and marked the beginning of Jim Crow laws by approving the de jure segregation. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would be largely inactive until the American Civil Rights Movement. Some modern courts up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court still interpret the Civil Rights Cases as limiting the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Under the original constitutional system, while federal Representatives were popularly elected, federal Senators were appointed by State legislatures, thus ensuring a balance between Federal and State interests at the Federal level. The Seventeenth Amendment significantly altered the relationship of State and Federal powers, weakening pro-state-autonomy influence at the Federal level.
By the beginning of the 20th century, greater cooperation began to grow between the State and federal governments. Soon, the federal government began to accumulate more power. It was early in this period that a federal income tax was implemented, first during the Civil War and then permanently with the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913. Before this, the states played a larger role in government.
States's rights were affected by the fundamental alteration of the federal government resulting from the Seventeenth Amendment, depriving state governments of an avenue of control over the federal government via the representation of each state's legislature in the U.S. Senate. This change has been described by legal critics as the loss of a check and balance on the federal government by the states.[7]
Following the Great Depression, the New Deal and then World War II continued the growth of the federal government, its authority, and its responsibilities. The case of Wickard v. Filburn allowed the federal government to enforce the Agricultural Adjustment Act, providing subsidies to farmers for limiting their crop yields, arguing agriculture affected interstate commerce and came under the jurisdiction of the Commerce Clause even when a farmer grew his crops not to be sold, but for his own private use.
After World War II, President Harry Truman supported a civil rights bill and desegregated the military. The reaction was a split in the Democratic Party that led to the formation of the "States' Rights Party"—better known as the Dixiecrats—led by Strom Thurmond. Thurmond ran as the States' Rights candidate for President in 1948, losing to Truman.
During the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the longstanding use of states' rights to maintain Southern racial politics was highlighted with proponents of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws denouncing federal interference in these state-level policies.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overruled the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, but the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were largely inactive in the South until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. § 21)[8] and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Several states passed Interposition Resolutions to declare that the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown usurped states' rights.
There was also states' rights opposition to voting rights at Edmund Pettus Bridge, which was part of the Selma to Montgomery marches that resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 1964, the issue of fair housing in California involved the boundary between state laws and federalism. California Proposition 14 overturned the Rumsford Fair Housing Act and allowed discrimination in any type of home sale.[citation needed] Martin Luther King, Jr. and others saw this as a backlash against civil rights. Actor Ronald Reagan gained popularity by supporting Proposition 14, and was later elected governor of California.[9] The U.S. Supreme Court's Reitman v. Mulkey decision overturned Proposition 14 in 1967 in favor of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Another concern is the fact that on more than one occasion, the federal government has threatened to withhold highway funds from states which did not pass certain articles of legislation. Any state which lost highway funding for any extended period would face financial impoverishment, infrastructure collapse or both. Although the first such action (the enactment of a national speed limit) was directly related to highways and done in the face of a fuel shortage, most subsequent actions have had little or nothing to do with highways and have not been done in the face of any compelling national crisis. An example of this would be the federally mandated drinking age of 21. Critics of such actions feel that when the federal government does this they upset the traditional balance between the states and the federal government.
More recently, the issue of states' rights has come to a head when the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) recommended that Congress and the Department of Defense implement sweeping changes to the National Guard by consolidating some Guard installations and closing others. These recommendations in 2005 drew strong criticism from many states, and several states sued the federal government on the basis that Congress and the Pentagon would be violating states' rights should they force the realignment and closure of Guard bases without the prior approval of the governors from the affected states. After Pennsylvania won a federal lawsuit to block the deactivation of the 111th Fighter Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, defense and Congressional leaders chose to try to settle the remaining BRAC lawsuits out of court, reaching compromises with the plaintiff states.[10]
Current states' rights issues include the death penalty, assisted suicide, gay marriage and the medicinal use of marijuana, the last of which is in violation of federal law. In Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the federal government, permitting the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to arrest medical marijuana patients and caregivers. In Gonzales v. Oregon, the Supreme court ruled the practice of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon is legal.
The term "states' rights," some have argued,[11] was used as a code word by defenders of segregation.[citation needed] It was the official name of the "Dixiecrat" party led by white supremacist presidential candidate Strom Thurmond.[12][13] George Wallace, the Alabama governor—who famously declared in his inaugural address, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"—later remarked that he should have said, "States' rights now! States' rights tomorrow! States' rights forever!"[citation needed] Wallace, however, claimed that segregation was but one issue symbolic of a larger struggle for states' rights; in that view, which some historians dispute, his replacement of segregation with states' rights would be more of a clarification than a euphemism.[14]
The Supreme Court's University of Alabama v. Garrett (2001)[15] and Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents (2000)[16] decisions allowed states to use a rational basis review for discrimination against the aged and disabled, arguing that these types of discrimination were rationally related to a legitimate state interest, and that no "razorlike precision" was needed." The Supreme Court's United States v. Morrison (2000)[17] decision limited the ability of rape victims to sue their attackers in federal court. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist explained that "States historically have been sovereign" in the area of law enforcement, which in the Court's opinion required narrow interpretations of the Commerce Clause and Fourteenth Amendment.
Kimel, Garrett and Morrison indicated that the Court's previous decisions in favor of enumerated powers and limits on Congressional power over the states, such as United States v. Lopez (1995), Seminole Tribe v. Florida (1996) and City of Boerne v. Flores (1997) were more than one time flukes. In the past, Congress relied on the Commerce Clause and the Equal Protection Clause for passing civil rights bills, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[8]
Lopez limited the Commerce Clause to things that directly affect interstate commerce, which excludes issues like gun control laws, hate crimes, and other crimes that affect commerce but are not directly related to commerce. Seminole reinforced the "sovereign immunity of states" doctrine, which makes it difficult to sue states for many things, especially civil rights violations. The Flores "congruence and proportionality" requirement prevents Congress from going too far in requiring states to comply with the Equal Protection Clause, which replaced the ratchet theory advanced in Katzenbach v. Morgan (1966). The ratchet theory held that Congress could ratchet up civil rights beyond what the Court had recognized, but that Congress could not ratchet down judicially recognized rights. An important precedent for Morrison was United States v. Harris (1883), which ruled that the Equal Protection Clause did not apply to a prison lynching because the state action doctrine applies Equal Protection only to state action, not private criminal acts. Since the ratchet principle was replaced with the "congruence and proportionality" principle by Flores, it was easier to revive older precedents for preventing Congress from going beyond what Court interpretations would allow. Critics such as Associate Justice John Paul Stevens accused the Court of judicial activism (i.e., interpreting law to reach a desired conclusion).
The tide against federal power in the Rehnquist court was stopped in the case of Gonzales v. Raich,[citation needed] in which the court upheld the federal power to prohibit medicinal use of cannabis even if states have permitted it. Rehnquist himself was a dissenter in the Raich case.
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