ABSTRACT
As a central feature of the American constitutional system, federalism is one of the most important contributions the Founders made to the art of government; it represents the paradigm of what is called federal government. The Founding generation's idea of confederal/federal arrangements, as represented in the Articles of Confederation, was characterized by three operative principles, each of which drastically limited the power of the central authority and preserved the primacy of the member states. Federalism would be, for them, the protective husk that preserved the kernels of free government. In short, the Framers' federalism helped to provide energetic government organized around the principle of qualitative majority rule. Dual federalism assumes that the two levels of government are coequal sovereignties and that each is supreme within its own sphere. The proponents of dual federalism insist that the Constitution is a compact among the states, which have, on certain enumerated issues, ceded a portion of their sovereignty to the national government.
