Chapter 3 Federalism

Exclusive Powers

The Constitution gives exclusive powersPowers that the Constitution grants to the national or state governments and prevents the other level from exercising. to the national government that states may not exercise. These are foreign relations, the military, war and peace, trade across national and state borders, and the monetary system. States may not make treaties with other countries or with other states, issue money, levy duties on imports or exports, maintain a standing army or navy, or make war.

Concurrent Powers

The Constitution accords some powers to the national government without barring them from the states. These concurrent powersPowers that the Constitution specifies that either national or state governments may exercise. include regulating elections, taxing and borrowing money, and establishing courts.

National and state governments both regulate commercial activity. In its commerce clauseThe section in the Constitution that gives Congress the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States and with the Indian tribes.”, the Constitution gives the national government broad power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States and with the Indian tribes.” This clause allowed the federal government to establish a national highway system that traverses the states. A state may regulate any and all commerce that is entirely within its borders.

National and state governments alike make and enforce laws and choose their own leaders. They have their own constitutions and court systems. A state’s Supreme Court decision may be appealed to the US Supreme Court provided that it raises a “federal question,” such as an interpretation of the US Constitution or of national law.

Implied Powers

The Constitution authorizes Congress to enact all laws “necessary and proper” to execute its enumerated powers. This necessary and proper clauseConstitutional provision that gives Congress vast power to enact all laws it considers “necessary and proper” to carry out its enumerated powers. allows the national government to claim implied powersUnlisted powers to the national government that are logical extensions from powers expressly enumerated in the Constitution., logical extensions of the powers explicitly granted to it. For example, national laws can and do outlaw discrimination in employment under Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.

Reserved Powers

Some powers are reserved to the states, such as ratifying proposed amendments to the Constitution and deciding how to elect Congress and the president. National officials are chosen by state elections.

Congressional districts are drawn within states. Their boundaries are reset by state officials after the decennial census. So the party that controls a state’s legislature and governorship is able to manipulate districts in its favor. Republicans, having taken over many state governments in the 2010 elections, benefited from this opportunity.

National Government’s Responsibilities to the States

The Constitution lists responsibilities the national government has to the states. The Constitution cannot be amended to deny the equal representation of each state in the Senate. A state’s borders cannot be altered without its consent. The national government must guarantee each state “a republican form of government” and defend any state, upon its request, from invasion or domestic upheaval.

States

In one sense, all fifty states are equal: each has two votes in the US Senate. The states also have similar governmental structures to the national government: three branches—executive, legislative, and judicial (only Nebraska has a one chamber—unicameral—legislature). Otherwise, the states differ from each other in numerous ways. These include size, diversity of inhabitants, economic development, and levels of education. Differences in population are politically important as they are the basis of each state’s number of seats in the House of Representatives, over and above the minimum of one seat per state.

States get less attention in the news than national and local governments. Many state events interest national news organizations only if they reflect national trends, such as a story about states passing laws regulating or restricting abortions.John Leland, “Abortion Foes Advance Cause at State Level,” New York Times, June 3, 2010, A1, 16.

A study of Philadelphia local television news in the early 1990s found that only 10 percent of the news time concerned state occurrences, well behind the 18 percent accorded to suburbs, 21 percent to the region, and 37 percent to the central city.Phyllis Kaniss, Making Local News (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), table 4.4. Since then, the commitment of local news outlets to state news has waned further. A survey of state capitol news coverage in 2002 revealed that thirty-one state capitols had fewer newspaper reporters than in 2000.Charles Layton and Jennifer Dorroh, “Sad State,” American Journalism Review, June 2002, http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=2562.

Native American Reservations

In principle, Native American tribes enjoy more independence than states but less than foreign countries. Yet the Supreme Court, in 1831, rejected the Cherokee tribe’s claim that it had the right as a foreign country to sue the state of Georgia. The justices said that the tribe was a “domestic dependent nation.”Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 US 1 (1831). As wards of the national government, the Cherokee were forcibly removed from land east of the Mississippi in ensuing years.

Native Americans have slowly gained self-government. Starting in the 1850s, presidents’ executive orders set aside public lands for reservations directly administered by the national Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). During World War II, Native Americans working for the BIA organized to gain legal autonomy for tribes. Buttressed by Supreme Court decisions recognizing tribal rights, national policy now encourages Native American nations on reservations to draft constitutions and elect governments.See Charles F. Wilkinson, American Indians, Time, and the Law: Native Societies in a Modern Constitutional Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); George Pierre Castile, To Show Heart: Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1960–1975 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); and Kenneth R. Philp, Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to Self-Determination, 1933–1953 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

Figure 3.1 Foxwoods Advertisement

The image of glamour and prosperity at casinos operated at American Indian reservations, such as Foxwoods (the largest such casino) in Connecticut, is a stark contrast with the hard life and poverty of most reservations.

© Thinkstock

Since the Constitution gives Congress and the national government exclusive “power to regulate commerce…with the Indian tribes,” states have no automatic authority over tribe members on reservations within state borders.Worcester v. Georgia, 31 US 515 (1832). As a result, many Native American tribes have built profitable casinos on reservations within states that otherwise restrict most gambling.Montana v. Blackfeet Tribe of Indians, 471 US 759 (1985); California v. Cabazon Band of Indians, 480 US 202 (1987); Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 US 44 (1996).

Local Governments

All but two states are divided into administrative units known as counties.The two exceptions are Alaska, which has boroughs that do not cover the entire area of the state, and Louisiana, where the equivalents of counties are parishes. States also contain municipalities, whether huge cities or tiny hamlets. They differ from counties by being established by local residents, but their powers are determined by the state. Cutting across these borders are thousands of school districts as well as special districts for drainage and flood control, soil and water conservation, libraries, parks and recreation, housing and community development, sewerage, water supply, cemeteries, and fire protection.The US Bureau of the Census categorizes those entities that are organized (usually chosen by election) with a governmental character and substantial autonomy. US Census Bureau, Government Organization: 2002 Census of Governments 1, no. 1: 6, http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/gc021x1.pdf.

Compact Theory

In 1798, Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, outlawing malicious criticism of the government and authorizing the president to deport enemy aliens. In response, the Republican Jefferson drafted a resolution passed by Kentucky’s legislature, the first states’ rights manifesto. It set forth a compact theory, claiming that states had voluntarily entered into a “compact” to ratify the Constitution. Consequently, each state could engage in “nullification” and “judge for itself” if an act was constitutional and refuse to enforce it.Forrest McDonald, States’ Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776–1876 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 38–43. However, Jefferson shelved states’ rights when, as president, he directed the national government to purchase the enormous Louisiana Territory from France in 1803.

Slavery and the Crisis of Federalism

After the Revolutionary War, slavery waned in the North, where slaves were domestic servants or lone farmhands. In the South, labor-intensive crops on plantations were the basis of Southern prosperity, which relied heavily on slaves.This section draws on James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

In 1850, Congress faced the prospect of new states carved from land captured in the Mexican War and debated whether they would be slave or free states. In a compromise, Congress admitted California as a free state but directed the national government to capture and return escaped slaves, even in free states. Officials in Northern states decried such an exertion of national power favoring the South. They passed state laws outlining rights for accused fugitive slaves and forbidding state officials from capturing fugitives.Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). The Underground Railroad transporting escaped slaves northward grew. The saga of hunted fugitives was at the heart of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold more copies proportional to the American population than any book before or since.

Figure 3.2 Lithograph from Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The plight of fugitive slaves, vividly portrayed in the mega best seller of the 1850s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, created a crisis in federalism that led directly to the Civil War.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/48734803@N00/252322873/.

In 1857, the Supreme Court stepped into the fray. Dred Scott, the slave of a deceased Missouri army surgeon, sued for freedom, noting he had accompanied his master for extended stays in a free state and a free territory.An encyclopedic account of this case is Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). The justices dismissed Scott’s claim. They stated that blacks, excluded from the Constitution, could never be US citizens and could not sue in federal court. They added that any national restriction on slavery in territories violated the Fifth Amendment, which bars the government from taking property without due process of law. To many Northerners, the Dred Scott decision raised doubts about whether any state could effectively ban slavery. In December 1860, a convention in South Carolina repealed the state’s ratification of the Constitution and dissolved its union with the other states. Ten other states followed suit. The eleven formed the Confederate States of America (see Note 3.19 "Enduring Image").

Enduring Image

The Confederate Battle Flag

The American flag is an enduring image of the United States’ national unity. The Civil War battle flag of the Confederate States of America is also an enduring image, but of states’ rights, of opposition to a national government, and of support for slavery. The blue cross studded with eleven stars for the states of the Confederacy was not its official flag. Soldiers hastily pressed it into battle to avoid confusion between the Union’s Stars and Stripes and the Confederacy’s Stars and Bars. After the South’s defeat, the battle flag, often lowered for mourning, was mainly a memento of gallant human loss.See especially Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

The flag’s meaning was transformed in the 1940s as the civil rights movement made gains against segregation in the South. One after another Southern state flew the flag above its capitol or defiantly redesigned the state flag to incorporate it. Over the last sixty years, a myriad of meanings arousing deep emotions have become attached to the flag: states’ rights; Southern regional pride; a general defiance of big government; nostalgia for a bygone era; racist support of segregation; or “equal rights for whites.”For overviews of these meanings see Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Random House, 1998) and J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su, eds., Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000).

Confederate Flag

© Thinkstock

The battle flag appeals to politicians seeking resonant images. But its multiple meanings can backfire. In 2003, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, addressed the Democratic National Committee and said, “White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us, and not them [Republicans], because their kids don’t have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too.” Dean received a rousing ovation, so he probably thought little of it when he told the Des Moines Register, “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.”All quotes come from “Dems Battle over Confederate Flag,” CNN, November 2, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/11/01/elec04.prez.dean.confederate.flag. Dean, the Democratic front runner, was condemned by his rivals who questioned his patriotism, judgment, and racial sensitivity. Dean apologized for his remark.“Dean: ‘I Apologize’ for Flag Remark,” CNN, November 7, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/11/06/elec04.prez.dean.flag.

The South’s defeat in the Civil War discredited compact theory and nullification. Since then, state officials’ efforts to defy national orders have been futile. In 1963, Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to resist a court order to desegregate the all-white school. Eventually, he had no choice but to accede to federal marshals. In 1994, Pennsylvania governor Robert Casey, a pro-life Democrat, decreed he would not allow state officials to enforce a national order that state-run Medicaid programs pay for abortions in cases of rape and incest. He lost in court.David L. Shapiro, Federalism: A Dialogue (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 98 n. 139.

The Politics of Sin

National powers were expanded when Congress targeted obscenity, prostitution, and alcohol.This section draws on James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), chaps. 8–11. In 1872, reformers led by Anthony Comstock persuaded Congress to pass laws blocking obscene material from being carried in the US mail. Comstock had a broad notion of sinful media: all writings about sex, birth control, abortion, and childbearing, plus tabloid newspapers that allegedly corrupted innocent youth.

Figure 3.3

The first book by Anthony Comstock, who headed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, aimed at the supposedly corrupting influence of the tabloid media of the day on children and proposed increasing the power of the national government to combat them.

Source: Morone, James A., Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 233.

As a result of these laws, the national government gained the power to exclude material from the mail even if it was legal in individual states.

The power of the national government also increased when prostitution became a focus of national policy. A 1910 exposé in McClure’s magazine roused President William Howard Taft to warn Congress about prostitution rings operating across state lines. The ensuing media frenzy depicted young white girls torn from rural homes and degraded by an urban “white slave trade.” Using the commerce clause, Congress passed the Mann Act to prohibit the transportation “in interstate commerce…of any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”Quoted in James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 266. The bill turned enforcement over to a tiny agency concerned with antitrust and postal violations, the Bureau of Investigations. The Bureau aggressively investigated thousands of allegations of “immoral purpose,” including unmarried couples crossing state lines to wed and interracial married couples.

The crusade to outlaw alcohol provided the most lasting expansion of national power. Reformers persuaded Congress in 1917 to bar importation of alcohol into dry states, and, in 1919, to amend the Constitution to allow for the nationwide prohibition of alcohol. Pervasive attempts to evade the law boosted organized crime, a rationale for the Bureau of Investigations to bloom into the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the equivalent of a national police force, in the 1920s.

Prohibition was repealed in 1933. But the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, its director from the 1920s to the 1970s, continued to call attention through news and entertainment media to the scourge of organized crime that justified its growth, political independence, and Hoover’s power. The FBI supervised film depictions of the lives of criminals like John Dillinger and long-running radio and television shows like The FBI. The heroic image of federal law enforcement would not be challenged until the 1960s when the classic film Bonnie and Clyde romanticized the tale of two small-time criminals into a saga of rebellious outsiders crushed by the ominous rise of authority across state lines.

Economic Regulation

Other national reforms in the late nineteenth century that increased the power of the national government were generated by reactions to industrialization, immigration, and urban growth. Crusading journalists decried the power of big business. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle exposed miserable, unsafe working conditions in America’s factories. These reformers feared that states lacked the power or were reluctant to regulate railroads, inspect meat, or guarantee food and drug safety. They prompted Congress to use its powers under the commerce clause for economic regulation, starting with the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 to regulate railroads and the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 to outlaw monopolies.

The Supreme Court, defending dual federalism, limited such regulation. It held in 1895 that the national government could only regulate matters directly affecting interstate commerce.United States v. E. C. Knight, 156 US 1 (1895). In 1918, it ruled that Congress could not use the commerce clause to deal with local matters like conditions of work. The national government could regulate interstate commerce of harmful products such as lottery tickets or impure food.Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 US 251 (1918). A similar logic prevented the US government from using taxation powers to the same end. Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company, 259 US 20 (1922).

The New Deal and the End of Dual Federalism

Elected in 1932, Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) sought to implement a “New Deal” for Americans amid staggering unemployment. He argued that the national government could restore the economy more effectively than states or localities. He persuaded Congress to enact sweeping legislation. New Deal programs included boards enforcing wage and price guarantees; programs to construct buildings and bridges, develop national parks, and create artworks; and payments to farmers to reduce acreage of crops and stabilize prices.

Figure 3.4 Dorothea Lange Photograph

The 1930s New Deal programs included commissioning photographers to document social conditions during the Great Depression. The resultant photographs are both invaluable historical documents and lasting works of art.

Source: Photo courtesy of the US Farm Security Administration, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dorothea_Lange,_Country_store_on_dirt _road,_Gordonton,_North_Carolina,_1939.jpg.

By 1939, national government expenditures equaled state and local expenditures combined.Thomas Anton, American Federalism & Public Policy: How the System Works (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988), 41. FDR explained his programs to nationwide audiences in “fireside chats” on the relatively young medium of radio. His policies were highly popular, and he was reelected by a landslide in 1936. As we describe in Chapter 15 "The Courts", the Supreme Court, after rejecting several New Deal measures, eventually upheld national authority over such once-forbidden terrain as labor-management relations, minimum wages, and subsidies to farmers.Respectively, National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel, 301 US 1 (1937); United States v. Darby, 312 US 100 (1941); Wickard v. Filburn, 317 US 111 (1942). The Court thereby sealed the fate of dual federalism.

Grants-in-Aid

Cooperative federalism’s central mechanisms were grants-in-aidThe national government’s provision of funds to states or localities to administer particular programs.: the national government passes funds to the states to administer programs. Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, national grants were awarded for infrastructure (airport construction, interstate highways), health (mental health, cancer control, hospital construction), and economic enhancement (agricultural marketing services, fish restoration).David B. Walker, The Rebirth of Federalism: Slouching toward Washington (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1999), 99.

Grants-in-aid were cooperative in three ways. First, they funded policies that states already oversaw. Second, categorical grantsGrants through which states and localities spend national funds on programs to meet the precise purposes Congress specified. required states to spend the funds for purposes specified by Congress but gave them leeway on how to do so. Third, states’ and localities’ core functions of education and law enforcement had little national government supervision.Martha Derthick, Keeping the Compound Republic: Essays on American Federalism (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2001), 17.

Judicial Nationalizing

Cooperative federalism was weakened when a series of Supreme Court decisions, starting in the 1950s, caused states to face much closer supervision by national authorities. As we discuss in Chapter 4 "Civil Liberties" and Chapter 5 "Civil Rights", the Court extended requirements of the Bill of Rights and of “equal protection of the law” to the states.

The Great Society

In 1963, President Lyndon Johnson proposed extending the New Deal policies of his hero, FDR. Seeking a “Great Society” and declaring a “War on Poverty,” Johnson inspired Congress to enact massive new programs funded by the national government. Over two hundred new grants programs were enacted during Johnson’s five years in office. They included a Jobs Corps and Head Start, which provided preschool education for poor children.

The Great Society undermined cooperative federalism. The new national policies to help the needy dealt with problems that states and localities had been unable or reluctant to address. Many of them bypassed states to go straight to local governments and nonprofit organizations.David B. Walker, The Rebirth of Federalism: Slouching toward Washington (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1999), 123–25.

Obstacles and Opportunities

In competitive federalism, national, state, and local levels clash, even battle with each other.The term “competitive federalism” is developed in Thomas R. Dye, American Federalism: Competition among Governments (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990). Overlapping powers and responsibilities create friction, which is compounded by politicians’ desires to get in the news and claim credit for programs responding to public problems.

Competition between levels of federalism is a recurring feature of films and television programs. For instance, in the eternal television drama Law and Order and its offshoots, conflicts between local, state, and national law enforcement generate narrative tension and drama. This media frame does not consistently favor one side or the other. Sometimes, as in the film The Fugitive or stories about civil rights like Mississippi Burning, national law enforcement agencies take over from corrupt local authorities. Elsewhere, as in the action film Die Hard, national law enforcement is less competent than local or state police.

Mandates

Under competitive federalism, funds go from national to state and local governments with many conditions—most notably, directives known as mandatesDirectives from the national government to state and local governments, either as orders or as conditions on the use of national funds..This definition is drawn from Michael Fix and Daphne Kenyon, eds., Coping with Mandates: What Are the Alternatives? (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 1988), 3–4. State and local governments want national funds but resent conditions. They especially dislike “unfunded mandates,” according to which the national government directs them what to do but gives them no funds to do it.

After the Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1994 elections, they passed a rule to bar unfunded mandates. If a member objects to an unfunded mandate, a majority must vote to waive the rule in order to pass it. This reform has had little impact: negative news attention to unfunded mandates is easily displaced by dramatic, personalized issues that cry out for action. For example, in 1996, the story of Megan Kanka, a young New Jersey girl killed by a released sex offender living in her neighborhood, gained huge news attention. The same Congress that outlawed unfunded mandates passed “Megan’s Law”—including an unfunded mandate ordering state and local law enforcement officers to compile lists of sex offenders and send them to a registry run by the national government.

National News Outlets

News on network television, cable news channels, and public broadcasting is aimed at a national audience. A few newspapers are also national. Reporters for these national outlets are largely based in New York and Washington, DC, and in a smattering of bureaus here and there across the country.

Local News Outlets

Local television stations transmit the news programs of the national networks to which they are affiliated. They broadcast local news on their own news shows. These shows are not devoid of substance, although it is easy to make fun of them as vapid and delivered by airheads, like Will Ferrell’s character Ron Burgundy in the 2004 comic film Anchorman. But they have only scattered national and international coverage, and attention to local and state government policies and politics is overshadowed by stories about isolated incidents such as crimes, car chases, and fires.

Almost all newspapers are local. Stories from the wire services enable them to include national and international highlights and some state items in their news, but most of their news is local. As their staff shrinks, they increasingly defer to powerful official sources in city hall or the police station for the substance of news. The news media serving smaller communities are even more vulnerable to pressure from local officials for favorable coverage and from advertisers who want a “feel-good” context for their paid messages.

From National to Local

Local newspapers and television stations sometimes have their own correspondents in Washington, DC. They can add a local angle by soliciting information and quotes from home-state members of Congress. Or, pooling of resources lets local television broadcasts make it look as though they have sent a reporter to Washington; a single reporter can send a feed to many stations by ending with an anonymous, “Now back to you.”

From Local to National

Some local stories become prominent and gain saturation coverage in the national news. Examples are the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999; the murder of pregnant Laci Peterson in California on Christmas Eve 2002; the kidnapping in Utah of Elizabeth Smart in 2003; and the 2005 battle over the fate of the comatose Terri Schiavo in Florida. The cozy relationships of local officials and local reporters are dislodged when national reporters from the networks parachute inWhen national reporters come from the networks to cover a local event. to cover the event.

In 2011, federalism took center stage with the efforts of Republican governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and related steps by the Republican governors of Indiana and Ohio, to save funds by stripping most of the collective bargaining power of the state’s public employee unions. Stories reported on the proposed policies, Democratic legislators’ efforts to thwart them, and the workers’ and supporters’ sit-ins and demonstrations.

Such stories expand amid attention from local and national news outlets and discussion about their meaning and import. National, state, and local officials alike find they have to respond to the problems evoked by the dramatic event.Benjamin I. Page, Who Deliberates? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

State News and State Politics

Except for certain governors and attorneys general, the local media give little space in their news to state governments and their policies. One reason is that there are only a few truly statewide news outlets like New Hampshire’s Manchester UnionLeader or Iowa’s Des Moines Register. Another reason is that most state capitals are far from the state’s main metropolitan area. Examples such as Boston and Atlanta, where the state capital is the largest city, are unusual. The four largest states are more typical: their capitals (Sacramento, Austin, Tallahassee, and Albany) are far (and in separate media markets) from Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and New York City.

Capital cities’ local news outlets do give emphasis to state government. But those cities are relatively small, so that news about state government usually goes to people involved with state government more than to the public in the state as a whole.

State officials do not always mind the lack of scrutiny of state government. It allows some of them to get their views into the media. Governors, for example, have full-time press officers as key advisors and routinely give interviews and hold news conferences. According to governors’ press secretaries, their press releases are often printed word-for-word across the state; and the governors also gain positive coverage when they travel to other cities for press events such as signing legislation.Charles Layton and Jennifer Dorroh, “Sad State,” American Journalism Review, June 2002, http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=2562.