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The national government picked up a host of new roles as American society became more complex, including that of guarantor of individual rights against state abuse.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed after the Civil War to make sure southern states extended all the protections of the Constitution to the newly freed slaves. In the 1950s and 1960s the Supreme Court used it to strike down state laws that maintained segregated, or separate, facilities for whites and African Americans, from railway cars to classrooms. By the 1970s the Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment had expanded, allowing it to declare unconstitutional many state laws that it said deprived state citizens of their rights as U.S. citizens. For instance, the Court ruled that states had to guarantee those accused of state crimes the same protections that the Bill of Rights guaranteed those accused of federal crimes. As we will see in more detail in Chapter 4, the Fourteenth Amendment has come to be a means for severely limiting the states’ powers over their own citizens, sometimes very much against their will.

The trend toward increased national power has not killed the narrative that states should have more power. In the 1970s and 1980s Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan tried hard to return some responsibilities to the states, mainly by giving them more control over how they spent federal money. In the next section, we look at recent efforts to alter the balance of federal power in favor of the states.

In Your Own Words

Demonstrate how the flexibility built into the Constitution has allowed it to change with the times.