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Cornell Law School defines federalism as a "system of government in which the same territory is controlled by two levels of government."

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Article I, section 8 of the Constitution establishes federal powers:

- coining money
- regulate interstate and federal commerce
- regulating the mail
- declaring war
- raising armies
- conducting foreign affairs
- establish inferior courts
- establish rules of naturalization

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- taxation
- lawmaking and -enforcement
- chartering banks and corporations
- taking land for public use
- establishing courts
- borrowing money

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- creating school systems,
- overseeing state courts,
- creating public safety systems,
- managing business and trade within the state,
- managing local government

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"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." (U.S. Constitution, Article VI)

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Venn diagram highlighting national and state government powers (as well as concurrent powers). Source: Britannica

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Cartoon highlighting the struggle between state and national powers. 

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This is an engaging video experience that explains what federalism really is.

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Federal vs. State Powers - Khan Academy Overview

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Federal vs. State Powers - Khan Academy Overview

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Federal and state powers and the Tenth and Fourteenth Amendments | Khan Academy

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Progression from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution - and how federalism is baked into it.

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When the 13 United States of America declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1776, the founders were attempting to break free from the tyranny of Britain's top-down centralized government.

But the first constitution the founders created, the Articles of Confederation, vested almost all power in individual state legislatures and practically nothing in the national government. The result-political chaos and crippling debt-almost sunk the fledgling nation before it left the harbor.

So the founders met again in Philadelphia in 1787 and drafted a new Constitution grounded in a novel separation of state and national powers known as federalism. While the word itself doesn't appear anywhere in the Constitution, federalism became the guiding principle to safeguard Americans against King George III-style tyranny while providing a check against rogue states.
READ MORE: How the United States Constitution Came to Be
Failures of the Articles of Confederation

The Articles of Confederation were written and ratified while the Revolutionary War was still raging. The document is less of a unifying constitution than a loose pact between 13 sovereign states intending to enter into "a firm league of friendship." Absent from the Articles of Confederation were the Executive or Judicial branches, and the national congress had only the power to declare war and sign treaties, but no authority to directly levy taxes.

As a result, the newly independent United States was buried in debt by 1786 and unable to pay the long-overdue wages of Revolutionary soldiers. The U.S. economy sunk into a deep depression and struggling citizens lost their farms and homes. In Massachusetts, angry farmers joined Shays' Rebellion to seize courthouses and block foreclosures, and a toothless congress was powerless to put it down.

George Washington, temporarily retired from government service, lamented to John Jay, "What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal & fallacious!"

Alexander Hamilton called for a new Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 where the Articles of Confederation were ultimately thrown out in favor of an entirely new form of government.
READ MORE: The Founding Fathers Feared Foreign Influence-And Devised Protections Against It
The Middle Road of Federalism

When the United States cut ties with Britain, the founders wanted nothing to do with the British form of government known as "unitary." Under a unitary regime, all power originates from a centralized national government (Parliament) and is delegated to local governments. That's still the way the government operates in the UK.

Instead, the founders initially chose the opposite form of government, a confederation. In a confederation, all power originates at the local level in the individual states and is only delegated to a weak central government at the states' discretion.

When the founders met in Philadelphia, it was clear that a confederation wasn't enough to hold the young nation together. States were scuffling over borders and minting their own money. Massachusetts had to hire its own army to put down Shays' Rebellion.

The solution was to find a middle way, a blueprint of government in which the powers were shared and balanced between the states and national interests. That compromise, woven into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, became known as federalism.

Two Kinds of 'Separation of Powers'

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights created two different kinds of separation of powers, both designed to act as critical checks and balances.

The first and best-known of the separation of powers is between the three branches of government: Executive, Legislative and the Judiciary. If the president acts against the best interests of the country, he or she can be impeached by Congress. If Congress passes an unjust law, the president can veto it. And if any law or public institution infringes on the constitutional rights of the people, the Supreme Court can remedy it.
READ MORE: How Many U.S. Presidents Have Faced Impeachment?
But the second type of separation of powers is equally important, the granting of separate powers to the federal and state governments. Under the Constitution, the state legislatures retain much of their sovereignty to pass laws as they see fit, but the federal government also has the power to intervene when it suits the national interest. And under the "supremacy clause" found in Article IV, federal laws and statutes supersede state law.

Federalism, or the separation of powers between the state and federal government, was entirely new when the founders baked it into the Constitution. And while it functions as an important check, it's also been a continual source of contention between the two levels of government. In the final run-up to the Civil War, the Southern states seceded from the Union in part because of the federal government was unconstitutionally encroaching on their " domestic institutions " of slavery.

How Federalism Works in the Constitution
WATCH: The Legislative Branch
According to James Madison, a committed federalist, the Constitution maintains the sovereignty of states by enumerating very few express powers to the federal government, while "[t]hose which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite."

Article I Section 8 contains a list of all of the "enumerated" powers that are exclusively delegated to the federal government. Those include the power to declare war, maintain armed forces, regulate commerce, coin money and establish a Post Office.

But that very same Section 8 also includes the so-called "Elastic Clause" that authorizes Congress to write and pass any laws that are "necessary and proper" to carry out its enumerated powers. These powers are known collectively as "implied powers" and have been used by Congress to create a national bank, to collect a federal income tax, to institute the draft, to pass gun control laws and to set a federal minimum wage, among others.

Other than that, the Constitution grants almost all other power and authority to the individual states, as Madison said. While the Constitution doesn't explicitly list the powers retained by the states, the founders included a catch-all in the 10th Amendment, ratified in 1791:

"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."

Those so-called "reserved" powers include all authority and functions of local and state governments, policing, education, the regulation of trade within a state, the running of elections and many more.

In the United States, federalism has proven a successful experiment in shared governance since 1787 and provided the model for similar federalist systems in Australia, Canada, India, Germany and several other nations.

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When the Founding Fathers Settled States' vs. Federal Rights-And Saved the Nation

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When the 13 United States of America declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1776, the founders were attempting to break free from the tyranny of Britain's top-down centralized government. But the first constitution the founders created, the Articles of Confederation, vested almost all power in individual state legislatures and practically nothing in the national government.

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- 9/11 and aftermath
- 2009 ARRA
- 2010 ACA

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Federalism will never be a subject of intense interest to most Americans, even if many of them are willing to pay $2,000 a ticket to watch a Broadway musical with a song on federal-state finances. Lin-Manuel Miranda worked that miracle in Hamilton; it's unlikely anybody will duplicate his feat in the foreseeable future, or perhaps ever.

But federalism -- the division of responsibility among national, state and local governments -- remains central to the entire project of American democracy. And over the last 30 years, the years in which Governing has been covering the story, our federal system has changed in crucial ways. In the last generation, we've evolved from a federalism that was largely about state and local governments asking for money from Washington to one focused on allocating power between the center and the provinces. Alexander Hamilton himself would have recognized many of the recent frictions. But some of the new tensions are ones that would have been hard to imagine in 1987, let alone 1787.

Consider three events in the past two decades that have brought a new form of federalism into being.

The first is the terrorist attacks of 2001. The 9/11 assault did more than cast a dark shadow over the country's sense of security. It established a new reality: Big national crises increasingly begin as local events, and the early stages of response depend on the capacity of local governments to act effectively. Homeland security suddenly became a major issue, depending on a new, complex security alliance across the levels of government.

In the aftermath of 9/11, New York City created its own counterterrorism bureau, which quickly became one of the world's very best, built on close operating relationships with the FBI. That, in turn, became the model for all the nation's largest cities and most state governments. In the Cold War, the federal government drove national security.

The age of terror turned that on its head, with local governments on the front lines. Their capacity to respond to terrorists and to natural disasters defines this new security alliance. If local governments stumble, as happened after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the implications are huge -- and national. President George W. Bush never recovered from the widespread belief that the nation had failed the residents of New Orleans. That's one of the big lessons for the Trump administration in the wake of hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

Second was the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the federal stimulus that pumped more than $830 billion into the economy. Many Americans have forgotten just how desperate the economic crisis of 2008 was -- and how close we came to an even broader global meltdown. Eager to shore up the economy, administration officials concluded that the only way to avoid an even deeper and longer disaster was with a massive transfusion of federal cash, especially for shovel-ready state and local projects.

But Obama administration officials also knew that spending so much cash so fast escalated the risk of massive fraud and waste. So they created a map-based system to track where the money went, with any American citizen free to type in any address and find out, down to the block level, which projects were working where.

The system solved a host of problems. It instantly helped citizens and reporters answer the question, "How does this program help me and my neighborhood?" Because state and local officials knew that anyone could track their work, they had a huge motivation to keep the projects running clean and on schedule. The stimulus -- and its map-based accountability system -- marked a true revolution in the federal government's use of data.

Third came the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010. Critics have relentlessly derided the program as a "government takeover of health care." In fact, the ACA was really a massive expansion in state regulation of private health insurance markets. Although the states' problems varied, depending on whether they decided to create their own exchanges or rely on the federal one, every state's health insurance commissioner had to devise new strategies to manage the private companies doing business within their borders.

That, not surprisingly, led to big variations among the states. Premium rates dropped 4 percent in Providence, R.I., from 2014 to 2018, while Nashville, Tenn., saw a 28 percent increase, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. But that only underlines the real stories of the ACA: the struggle, state by state, to figure out how to make health insurance work; the way big increases in a few states helped drive the congressional campaign against the law; and the insistence of even Republican governors that Congress not solve its tough problems by dumping the hard issues on the states -- without providing money to pay for them.

These "big three" events mark a cluster of truly fundamental but largely unnoticed changes in federalism since Governing 's founding. They're very likely to shape the next generation of the magazine's coverage. And who knows? Maybe they could inspire a tune in Broadway's next big musical about federalism.

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Federalism will never be a subject of intense interest to most Americans, even if many of them are willing to pay $2,000 a ticket to watch a Broadway musical with a song on federal-state finances. Lin-Manuel Miranda worked that miracle in Hamilton; it's unlikely anybody will duplicate his feat in the foreseeable future, or perhaps ever.

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How the Constitution's federalist framework is being tested by COVID-19

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How the Constitution's federalist framework is being tested by COVID-19

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Global pandemic testing the balance of powers - federal vs. states.

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As all 50 states start to reopen their economies, government officials face questions about their response to the coronavirus pandemic. While a vast majority of discourse focuses on the important health consequences resulting from variation in state restrictions, conflicting policies across the country highlight some key constitutional issues that remain unresolved as we move forward in this crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought increasing attention to our federalist form of government. The traditional story of federalism recognizes that the national government can make policy in some areas, while the states reserve the right to regulate in other areas. However, as the pandemic has highlighted, things are not always that clear-cut. The constitutional boundaries between state and federal authority are increasingly difficult to ascertain. As a result of political decisions by both state and federal elected officials, today's American government looks different than originally contemplated by the nation's founders. Here are four developments in our federal system of government illuminated by COVID-19.
Governors' executive powers have expanded
One of the Anti-Federalist critiques of the Constitution was that the presidency was a disguised monarchy that, in collaboration with the Senate, would rule the country tyrannically. The Federalists countered that, combined with separation of powers, the distribution of authority between the state and national governments would prevent executive power grabs.

However, over time, the executive branch at each level of government has grown in size and authority. National executive agencies now create policies that regulate Americans' economic, social, and political activities, prompting Chief Justice John Roberts to muse that the current executive branch would leave the Framers "rubbing their eyes." A similar expansion of executive power has occurred at the state level. A cycle of reform in state government has marked the past decades, prompted by a concerted effort to strengthen historically weak governorships.

This transfer of power to the executive is heightened in times of crisis. At the onset of an emergency, citizens look to executive officials to direct government action. Additionally, as a result of their deliberative nature, the legislative and judicial branches tend to play a more reactive role. We've seen this in both national and state responses to COVID-19. For example, while the Trump administration took its first actions in response to the pandemic in early February, Congress did not pass the CARES Act until late March. At the state level, only 29 state legislatures have passed legislation relating to the coronavirus, while every state governor has taken executive action.
National politicians look to governors for partisan wins
Even with an expanded executive branch, the national government simply does not have the resources to do everything it wants. As a result, it increasingly turns to the states to carry out important governmental tasks. Such reliance further develops and strengthens executive branch actors at the state level. This is particularly true in healthcare, where lines between state and federal policy are quite blurred.

How politicians engage this complicated relationship between the state and federal government is strategic-federalism has become an important tool in political negotiations. National political figures enact vague policies that allow for variation in state implementation, claiming credit for acting on important issues while shifting the responsibility for figuring out the details to the states. Not only does this strategy allow for some states to take minimal efforts in implementing federal policy, but it can enhance partisan conflict. President Trump's actions over the past few months illustrate this point. When his administration began to respond to the crisis, issuing guidelines and emergency use authorizations, he used his relationships with various governors for partisan gain. In one of his more colorful statements on the issue, Trump tweeted "Tell the Democrat Governors that 'Mutiny On The Bounty' was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain." Such comments suggest that political competition may no longer flow through the separation of powers or federalist system, but rather through political parties.
Thousands of jurisdictions administer elections
Of course, elections provide citizens with a way to comment on the policies that the political parties adopt. However, elections represent a classic example of how federalism presents the nation with new challenges. The decentralized process provided by the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution ensures that the regulation and administration of elections occur at the state level. While designed to enhance geographically-based representation, this decentralization results in tremendous variation in the legal frameworks that govern the electoral process. Because of how states delineate responsibility for elections, approximately 8,000 different jurisdictions administer American elections. This incredible number has led many to refer to election administration as " hyperfederalized."

Such a system not only makes governing the electoral process complex, but also has profound implications for how administrators will implement and citizens will experience that framework in the pandemic. We have already seen it play out in the past few months, with more than 20 states postponing elections due to coronavirus and federal and state litigation arising over several states' mail-in and absentee voting policies.
Accountability for responding to COVID-19 is complicated
Even if all citizens have equal opportunity to vote under comparable electoral rules, one could question whom citizens should hold accountable for COVID-19 policy. When the states and national government act in the same policy space, voters may not be able to discern whom to blame when things go poorly and to reward when things go well.

This accountability problem only amplifies when unelected administrators are thrown into the mix. For example, what if the Food and Drug Administration moves too quickly in approving a coronavirus vaccine that has harmful side-effects? The president will undoubtedly blame faceless bureaucrats in the "deep state," state governors will blame the Trump administration (and likely the president himself) for fast-tracking dangerous drugs, and voters will be left wondering why government seems dysfunctional. As the 2020 presidential election approaches and voters begin to evaluate elected officials, the ability to hold politicians responsible for their actions is particularly important.

Ironically, the Framers anticipated that federalism would increase accountability and further the general welfare of American citizens. As we move forward in the coming months, whether our constitutional design furthers these goals remains to be seen.

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How the Constitution's federalist framework is being tested by COVID-19

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Jennifer Selin writes that the COVID-19 pandemic has raised issues of state and federal control that are not fully resolved. Among them, governors have gained a lot of executive power in recent years and they have also participated in partisan conflicts with or against sitting presidents.

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Modern take: how states take back power amid COVID-19 pandemic.