The Invisible Black Victim: How American Federalism Perpetuates ...

local political mobilization that links groups in local settings with similarly situated groups in
other cities. Such groups would need to build, and build upon, strong, federated organizations
that could pressure sufficient numbers of national lawmakers to include relief for urban areas
in congressional spending bills and to provide incentives for state and local criminal justice
agencies to scale back criminal penalties, particularly for nonviolent offenders. Such an
approach, however, would require acknowledging that a national civil rights strategy may
have been successful despite our federal system, not because of it, and that the future lies in
knowing how to recognize and build upon existing political mobilization to overcome the
structural biases of American federalism.
Footnote
1 I use the term federalism to refer to the constitutional division of power ''whereby the
functions of government are divided between one national government and numerous subnational
ones'' (Derthick 1992:671).
2 See U.S. v. Lopez (514 U.S. 549, 1995) and U.S. v. Morrison (529 U.S. 598, 2000) as
examples of the Supreme Court limiting Congress's power under the Commerce Clause. See
also Printz v. U.S. (1997), striking down provisions of the Brady Act.
3 Complaint in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Case No.
3:10-cv-91. See also Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief in the United States
District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Civil Action No. 3: 10-cv- 188, March 23,
2010.
4 See also contemporary examples such as tax day tea parties organized around April 15 and
July 4, 2009 (''Protestors Air Views on Government Spending at Tax Day Tea Parties Across
U.S.,'' The New York Times,16 April 2009, p. A16), and Texas Governor Rick Perry's
remarks, in the wake of President Barack Obama's federal economic stimulus package, that
''if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows
what might come out of that'' (''Texas Governor Succession Talk Taps Tradition, Anger,''
Dallas Morning News, 19 April 2009, p. A5).
5 The Constitution does provide Congress with the authority to punish ''counterfeiting the
Securities and current Coin of the United States,'' as well as ''piracies and Felonies,
committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations'' (Article I, Section 8).
Article III, Section 3 provides that ''Congress shall have the power to declare the punishment
of treason,'' and Article IV, Section 2 requires states to return felons from other states to their
respective homes.
6 The Policy Agendas Project is an ambitious project aimed at providing truly comparable
measures of policy changes in the United States since the Second World War. The data used
here were originally collected by Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, with the support
of National Science Foundation grant number SBR 9320922, and they were distributed
through the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin and the
Department of Political Science at Penn State University. Neither the National Science
Foundation nor the original collectors of the data bear any responsibility for the analysis
reported here (http://www.policyagendas.org).