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509 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1990)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0509 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE This is the fourth volume of TheAnnals to be devoted to developments in American federalism and intergovernmental relations. The first volume was edited by W. Brooke Graves in 1940, the second by Harry W. Reynolds, Jr., in 1965, and the third by Richard H. Leach in 1974. One could perhaps pose the same question about this volume that Professor Leach raised in 1974: With a twenty-five year lapse between the first two volumes, one might legitimately ask why a third volume was deemed necessary in only nine years.' This fourth volume appears 16 years after the third volume, but the longer wait has been worthwhile because, as it turns out, the third volume appeared near the end of the high-spending federal aid era associated with President Lyndon B. Johnson's socially optimistic Great Society and President Richard M. Nixon's fiscally optimistic New Federalism. In the world of federalism today, the days of Creative Federalism and General Revenue Sharing now seem like ancient history. This fourth volume is appearing, then, in the midst of a new era marked significantly by the fiscally stringent new New Federalism of President Ronald Reagan, the first president to complete two terms since Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose own concerns about federalism led to the creation of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) in 1959. One sign of the changing times in intergovernmental relations is that 29 states now have ACIR counterpart organizations to deal with state-local relations. Tremendous changes have occurred in the federal system since 1974. Furthermore, a variety of fiscal, economic, social, and political indicators suggest that 1978 can be taken as the benchmark year for the latest sea change in modern American federalism. For one thing, federal aid as a percentage of state and local outlays, federal outlays, and gross national product peaked in 1978. We also have seen the U.S. Supreme Court flip-flop from its 1976 decision in National League of Cities v. Usery to its 1985 decision in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority. Indeed, more than 35 percent of all U.S. Supreme Court rulings declaring a state or local act to be unconstitutional in our 200-year history as a federal republic have been issued during the past 25 years alone. Another striking sign of a new era in federalism and intergovernmental relations is that more than 50 percent of all federal statutes explicitly preempting state and local authority enacted in our 200-year history have been enacted during the last 20 years. Yet, at the same time, most observers of the federal system seem to agree that we have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of state governments during the past two decades, with some conservative observers even expressing concern that the Great Society has moved from Washington to the state capitals. Activism, professionalism, innovation, experimentation, and competence are among the attributes now more often applied to state - and local-governments than to the federal government. Even in a policy field 1. Richard H. Leach, Preface, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 416:xi (Nov. 1974). 9

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