ABSTRACT
American federalism today is coercive compared to previous eras often termed dual and cooperative. The contemporary era is coercive because the leading political, fiscal, statutory, regulatory, and judicial trends entail impositions of federal rules and regulations on state and local governments. This coercive system began in the late 1960s, following a roughly 35-year era commonly called "cooperative federalism". The first era of US federalism, begun in 1789 and usually labeled "dual federalism", was rooted in the dual federal-state constitutionalism, dual sovereignty, and dual citizenship attributes of the new federal arrangement. The dual-federalism model endured as a rhetorical foil for champions of national power over states' rights. Morton Grodzins, a critic of the dual-federalism view, inadvertently immortalized it when he christened it "layer-cake" federalism, in contrast to his "marble-cake" metaphor for a system characterized by both chaos and cooperation in which "no important activity of government is the exclusive province of one of the" spheres of government.
