1965 Voting Rights Act

When the United States was in its infancy, debates raged over concerns of how and where power would be distributed throughout the new government. The first proposals for a system of government, led by the father of the Constitution, James Madison, favored a strong national government composed primarily of a legislature based upon representation by population. His proposal, however, was significantly weakened by the cries of delegates from smaller states insisting that checks on the national government in the name of states’ rights were necessary to prevent tyranny; the distribution of power to the states resulted in numerous inefficiencies, the suppression of civil rights, and most consequentially, civil war. However, there has been a steady …show more content…
Only after the national government assumed a stronger role in the protection of civil rights was equal legal citizenship achieved. For instance, determination of voting rights is an issue traditionally left to state legislatures, a role that bolstered the second class status of African Americans due to their underrepresentation, therefore providing no incentives to politicians to protect their rights. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, seen by opponents as a tyrannical overreach of federal power, carved out authority for the national government to prevent maneuvers intended to disenfranchise black voters such as literacy tests and poll taxes, drastically increasing the political power of African Americans. The widening sphere of responsibility for the national government thus expanded the inclusivity of American democracy, allowing previously oppressed groups to voice their …show more content…
The difficulty with regulatory policies designed to protect the environment is that regulations are often seen as harmful to commerce within a state; this situation locks the states into a prisoner’s dilemma in which there is fear that the instatement of environmental regulations within one state will be met with failure to do so by another, causing business and capital to flock to the unregulated state. Once again, the national government serves as a means of overcoming collective action issues between states with its creation of uniform environmental policy. The pinnacle of federal environmental policy arose in 1973 with the passage of the Clean Air Act, a provision that vests the power to regulate the emission of dangerous pollutants within the Environmental Protection Agency, with the goal of ensuring systematic air quality standards in all states. Although cities like Chicago and Cincinnati had enacted their own clean air legislation by 1891, pollution remained largely unregulated, manifesting itself in the visible smog clouds that hovered over large cities, prompting Congress to act. In this classic example of a collective action issue, the national government has the power to pull the states from their prisoner’s dilemma, allowing each to come to the desirable outcome of clean air while ensuring that the costs are