ABSTRACT
In the early days of the Republic, there was a major political controversy concerning the nature of the federalism which had been created at the Philadelphia Convention. The Jeffersonian Democratic- Republicans wanted to see a restricted national authority and were concerned to protect the rights of the states against encroachment and centralizing tendencies. The most obvious way of changing the constitutional relationship is by altering the written document, and some of the amendments passed since 1787 have significantly affected the federal system. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to ensure that the states provided ‘due process of law’ and ‘equal protection’ of the laws to all their citizens. As the Sixteenth Amendment allowed the federal government to raise income taxes there was a considerable improvement in its tax base after 1913 and this led to a great expansion in the size of its budget and the scope of its activities.
