Abstract
“The era of big government is over.” That dramatic pronouncement by Bill Clinton was the catch phrase of his 1996 State of the Union address. Coming in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s efforts to devolve power back to state governments, and uttered in the midst of Clinton’s battles with an assertive Republican Congress, this proclamation appeared to mark a turning point in the evolution of American federalism
A version of portions of this chapter appeared in Tim Conlan and John Dinan, “Federalism, the Bush Administration, and the Transformation of American Conservatism,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 37 (Summer 2007): 279–303.
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Notes
See Michael D. Tanner, Leviathan on the Right: How Big Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution (Washington: Cato Institute, 2007); and Bruce Bartlett, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy (New York: Doubleday, 2006).
Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2008, 25–26.
Ibid.
Office of Management and Budget, Analytical Perspectives, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2008, 107.
See U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR), Regulatory Federalism: Policy, Process, Impact and Reform (Washington, DC: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1984); and John Kincaid, “From Cooperative to Coercive Federalism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 509 (May 1990): 139–152.
ACIR, Regulatory Federalism, 7–10.
Patrick J. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965–2005 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2006), 182.
Sarah F. Liebschutz and Daniel J. Palazzolo, “HAVA and the States,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 35 (Fall 2005): 497–514.
Congressional Research Service, Election Reform: The Help American Vote Act and Issuesfor Congress, (Washington, DC: CRS, 2004).
The Real IDAct: National Impact Analysis, Report Prepared by the National Governors Association, National Conference of State Legislatures, and American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (Washington: September 2006).
Martha Derthick, “Going Federal: The Launch of Medicare Part D Compared to SSI,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 37 (Summer 2007): 351–370.
Joseph F. Zimmerman, “Congressional Preemption During the George W. Bush Administration,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 37 (Summer 2007): 432–452.
Based on data provided by Zimmerman, the corresponding rates are 11.5 new preemptions per year under Reagan, 8.5 per year under George H.W. Bush, and 8 new preemptions annually under Bill Clinton. Ibid., 443, 444.
See, among others, such cases as New York v. United States, 112 S.Ct. 2408; Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 98 1997; Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, et al., 517 U.S. 44, 1996; and Alden, et al. v. Maine, 119 S.Ct. 2240, 1999.
For some examples in the Reagan administration, see Timothy J. Conlan, “Federalism and Competing Values in the Reagan Administration,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism (Winter 1986): 29–47.
See, for example, Michael S. Greve, “Federalism’s Frontier,” Texas Review of Law Politics 93 (2002): 93–126.
Quoted in Tanner, Leviathan on the Right, 48.
See, for example, Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), chap. 2.
For a libertarian critique, see Bartlett, Imposter; social conservative complaints of Bush Administration hypocrisy can be found in David Kuo, Tempting Faith (New York: The Free Press, 2006).
Quoted in Thomas B Edsall and John F Harris, “Bush Aims to Forge a GOP Legacy: Second-term Plans Look to Undercut Democratic Pillars,” The Washington Post, January 30, 2005, Al.
Ibid.
Andrea Louise Campbell and Kimberley Morgan, “The Medicare Modernization Act and the New Politics of Medicare,” Paper Prepared for the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, August 31-September 3, 2006.
Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967).
Quoted in Tanner, Leviathan on the Right, 6.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).
Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, The Condition of Contemporary Federalism: Conflicting Theories and Collapsing Constraints, A-78 (Washington: ACIR, 1981), 224–226.
HR 3801, sec. 186 (a).
President George W. Bush, “Statement on Signing Legislation to Provide for Improvement of Federal Education Research, Statistics, Evaluation, Information, and Dissemination, and for Other Purposes,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (November 8, 2002), 1995. See also Charlie Savage, “Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws: President Cites Powers of His Office,” The Boston Globe, April 30, 2006. Accessed online at http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/30/bush_challenges_hundreds_oflaws/
James Pfiffner, “The First MBA President: George W. Bush as Public Administrator,” Public Administration Review 67 (January/February 2007): 6–20.
See, for example, “Of the CEOs, by the CEOs, for the CEOs,” The American Prospect (August 12, 2002): 6; and Lexington, ” The CEO presidency,” The Economist (June 15, 2002), 50.
Kenneth T. Walsh, “Falling Stock: George Bush Wants to Run His Presidency Like a Business, but Critics Say the Bottom Line Is Not Encouraging,” U.S. News and World Report (April 3, 2006), 31–33.
See Office of Management and Budget, The President’s Management Agenda, Fiscal Year 2002 at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2002/mgmt.pdf; and http://www.whitehouse.gov/results/.
Beryl Radin, “Performance Management and Intergovernmental Relations,” in Intergovernmental Management for the 21st Century, ed. Paul Posner and Timothy Conlan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, forthcoming).
H. George Frederickson, “When Accountability Meets Collaboration,” PA Times (February 2007), 11.
Paul L. Posner, “Accountability Challenges of Third Party Government,” in Lester M. Salamon, The Tools of Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 523–551.
Office of Management and Budget, Analytical Perspectives, Fiscal Year 2008, 105–106.
Tim Conlan, “From Cooperative to Opportunistic Federalism,” Public Administration Review 66 (September/October 2006): 663–676.
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© 2008 Iwan W. Morgan and Philip J. Davies
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Conlan, T.J. (2008). Federalism, the Bush Administration and the Evolution of American Politics. In: Morgan, I.W., Davies, P.J. (eds) The Federal Nation. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617254_2
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