Conservative Innovators: How States Are Challenging Federal Power, by Ben Merriman

Abstract

What are the effects of the current political climate of hyper-polarization on intergovernmental relations? In Conservative Innovators, Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas Ben Merriman argues that polarization has “everything to do with state governments” and that it has encouraged heightened intergovernmental disagreement. The main assumption of the book is that state-level conservative figures such as governors and attorneys general developed a repertoire of strategies to challenge the Obama administration’s policies during the years 2009–16 and have transformed partisan disagreement into a conflict between different levels of government. This has been possible, Merriman argues, because the Obama era coincided with the consolidation of a long process in which the executive powers of state officials had grown along with expansion of the federal government. Conservative Innovators is a study of the different legal and political strategies used by state conservatives to push back on Obama’s major reforms. Chapter one sets the scene by discussing the growth of the administrative state and the resulting expansion of the executive power of agencies, endorsed by the courts’ elaboration of the doctrine of judicial deference. State executives grew in parallel with the federal executive at the expense of state legislatures, a phenomenon defined by Merriman as a “relatively successful model of executive federalism.” The major implication of the concentration of state power in the executive is that executive officeholders (state attorneys general) became increasingly important and could coordinate interstate legal and administrative actions.