|Also known as:
Commonwealth (Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia)
|Populations||563,626 ‒ 37,253,9561|
|Areas||1,214 square miles (3,140 km2) ‒ 663,268 square miles (1,717,860 km2)2|
|Subdivisions||County (or equivalent)|
of the United States
A state of the United States is one of the 50 constituent political entities that shares its sovereignty with the United States federal government. Because of the shared sovereignty between each U.S. state and the U.S. federal government, an American is a citizen of both the federal republic and of his or her state of domicile.3 State citizenship and residency are flexible and no government approval is required to move between states, except for persons covered by certain types of court orders (e.g., paroled convicts and children of divorced spouses who are sharing custody).
States are divided into counties or county-equivalents, which may be assigned some local governmental authority but are not sovereign. County or county-equivalent structure varies widely by state. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia use the official title of Commonwealth rather than State.
State governments are allocated power by the people (of each respective state) through their individual constitutions. By ratifying the United States Constitution, the states transferred certain limited sovereign powers to the federal government. Historically, the tasks of law enforcement, public education, public health, transportation, and infrastructure have generally been considered primarily state responsibilities, although all of these now have significant federal funding and regulation as well.
Over time, the U.S. Constitution has been amended, and the interpretation and application of its provisions have changed. The general tendency has been toward centralization and incorporation, with the federal government playing a much larger role than it once did. There is a continuing debate over states' rights, which concerns the extent and nature of the states' powers and sovereignty in relation to the federal government as well as the rights of individual persons. Debates over states' rights were a contributing factor to the outbreak of the American Civil War.
The United States Congress may admit new states on an equal footing with existing ones; this last happened in 1959 with the admission of Alaska (Jan. 3) and Hawaii (Aug. 21). The U.S. Constitution is silent on the question of whether states have the power to leave, or secede from, the Union, but the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled45 unilateral secession to be unconstitutional, a position driven in part by the outcome of the American Civil War.
- 1 Map
- 2 Federal power
- 3 Governments
- 4 Relationships
- 5 Admission into the union
- 6 Secession
- 7 Commonwealths
- 8 Origin of states' names
- 9 Geography
- 10 See also
- 11 References
- 12 Further reading
- 13 External links
Since the early 20th century, the Supreme Court of the United States has interpreted the Commerce Clause of the Constitution of the United States to allow greatly expanded scope of federal power over time, at the expense of powers formerly considered purely states matters. The Cambridge Economic History of the United States says, "On the whole, especially after the mid-1880s, the Court construed the Commerce Clause in favor of increased federal power."6 In Wickard v. Filburn 317 U.S. 111 (1942), the court expanded federal power to regulate the economy by holding that federal authority under the commerce clause extends to activities which are local in character.7
For example, Congress can regulate railway traffic across state lines, but it may also regulate rail traffic solely within a state, based on the theory that wholly intrastate traffic can still have an impact on interstate commerce. In recent years, the Court has tried to place limits on the Commerce Clause in such cases as United States v. Lopez and United States v. Morrison.clarification needed
Another source of congressional power is its spending power—the ability of Congress to impose taxes and distribute the 