Is the federal division of powers an obstruction to good governance in the United States?
The federal division of powers does not provide an obstruction to good governance in the US. For this argument to hold, federal division of power and good governance will be defined. This division provides for different levels of government representing the interests of the people rather than there being further layers of bureaucracy. Different examples will be used to show that the federal division of power does not hinder the goal of good governance. The term horizontal division of power applies to the separation in the federal government between the Presidency, Supreme Court and Congress. This answer will mainly concentrate on the vertical division of power between the federal, state and local governments.
Firstly, the federal division of power has different meanings in different temporal contexts. The Founding Fathers envisaged the federal division of power as a form of 'dual sovereignty' whereby the national and state governments had separate responsibilities as defined in the Constitution. 'Dual sovereignty' in most cases was the pattern until the New Deal when circumstances changed and there was an increase in federal government activity infiltrating the power of the states. This made it impossible to divide government in such a definite way. The increased involvement of federal government has been inevitable because of the national integration of the economy with mass media, communications and finance.
A division of power implies that there is a partition or split in the powers governing America. Superficially this is the case because there is; the Federal government that is internally separated, there are fifty State governments and under this, there are various municipality, district and regional governments. Nowadays, political life cannot be so perfectly compartmentalised because there must be adaptation ...