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Presidential administration is more entrenched and expansive than ever. Most significant policymaking comes from agency action rather than legislation. Courts endorse "the presence of Presidential power" in agency decisionmaking. Scholars give up on external checks and balances and take presidential direction as a starting point. Yet presidential administration is also quite fragile. Even as the Court embraces presidential control, it has been limiting the administrative domain over which the President presides. And when Presidents drive agency action in a polarized age, their policies are not only immediately contested but also readily reversed by their successors. States complicate each piece of this story. In critical respects, federalism further strengthens presidential administration. Waivers, grants, nonpreemption of state law, and other intergovernmental techniques enable Presidents to effectuate policy agendas when federal agencies lack sufficient authority. States also furnish durability because their policies may outlast a President's tenure when federal policies do not. At the same time, federalism diversifies administration and broadens its representative base. Defenses of presidential power as "accountable" and "effective" sound increasingly empty, if not dangerously autocratic. Yet it is easier to condemn presidential administration than to locate alternatives that connect the administrative state to electoral politics and representative institutions as well as to expertise and deliberation. Because state legislators and governors may furnish these connections, plural administrative states offer the most promising path forward for the contemporary administrative state.

This article provides an account of Our Regionalism to supplement the many accounts of Our Federalism. After describing the legal forms regions assume in the United States — through interstate cooperation, organization of federal administrative agencies, and hybrid state-federal efforts — it explores how regions have shaped American governance across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the years leading up to the New Deal, commentators invoked regions to resist centralization, arguing that state coordination could forestall expansion of the federal government. But regions were soon deployed to a different end, as the federal government relied on regional administration to develop its bureaucracy. Incorporating regional accommodations and regional organization into new programs allowed the federal government to expand its role in domestic policymaking. As interstate regionalism yielded to federal regionalism, the administrative state was propelled forward by a strategy that had arisen to resist it. Even as regions facilitated the expansion of the New Deal administrative state, however, the regional organization and argument that underpinned this development left room for state influence within federal programs and for new projects of multistate and joint state-federal governance. The century's next regional moment brought this potential to the fore, with regions brokering the resurgence of the states in Great Society programs. In the early twenty-first century, new regional undertakings have been celebrated as fluid, nonhierarchical networks. Although the network metaphor has been exhausted, this characterization anticipates the emergence of "regionalism without regions": collaborations among multiple state and federal actors that need not involve contiguous areas. Just as regional improvisation has responded to governance challenges of past decades, this nascent development responds to today's polarized partisanship. It betokens both the revival and the transformation of the political sectionalism that has always informed American regionalism even as it slipped behind an administrative veneer for much of the twentieth century.

In a time of polarization, states may introduce salutary pluralism into an executive-dominated regime. With partisan divisions sidelining Congress, states are at once principal implementers and principal opponents of presidential policies. As polarization makes states more central to national policymaking, however, it also poses new threats to their ability to act. This Essay cautions against recent efforts to preempt state control over state officials and to require states to follow other states' policies, using sanctuary jurisdictions and the pending federal Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act as examples.

This commentary considers what federalism all the way up means for Gerken's proposed new process federalism. The state-federal integration she documents underscores why judicial policing of "conditions for federal-state bargaining" cannot be limited to state-federal relations in the traditional sense. It must extend to state challenges to the allocation and exercise of authority within the federal government. The new process federalism would therefore do well to address when states will have standing to bring such cases in federal court. After Part I describes contemporary federalism-all-the-way-up litigation, Part II suggests that Gerken's "Federalism 3.0" complicates both traditional parens patriae and sovereignty arguments for state standing but lends force to the recognition of states' representative role within federal schemes.

This Article proposes a different way of thinking about contemporary American governance, looking to an established foreign practice. Executive federalism – "processes of intergovernmental negotiation that are dominated by the executives of the different governments within the federal system" – is pervasive in parliamentary federations, such as Canada, Australia, and the European Union. Given the American separation of powers arrangement, executive federalism has been thought absent, even "impossible," in the United States. But the partisan dynamics that have gridlocked Congress and empowered both federal and state executives have generated a distinctive American variant. Viewing American law and politics through the lens of executive federalism brings four key features into focus. First, executives have become dominant actors at both the state and federal levels. They formulate policy and manage intergovernmental relations. Although executive negotiations have shaped American federalism at least since the New Deal, Congress once superintended them. Today, from healthcare to marijuana to climate change, federal and state executives negotiate without Congress. Second, there is a substantial degree of mutuality among these executives, much more than is suggested by the federal government's legal supremacy. Federal and state actors turn to state law as well as federal law to further their agendas; sometimes this amplifies conflict, but it also enables officials to find paths to compromise. Third, national policy frequently comes to look different across the states as a result of executive negotiations. Some states more strongly press a position shared by the federal executive, while others offer competing views. Finally, horizontal relationships among the states are critical in setting national policy, as the federal executive builds on interstate agreements and reshapes them in turn. In charting the emergence of executive federalism in the United States, this Article seeks to identify a distinctive approach to national policymaking and to offer a qualified defense of the phenomenon.

From healthcare to marijuana to climate change, negotiations among federal and state executive branch actors increasingly set national policy in the United States. This executive federalism fits uneasily into existing understandings: it departs from expectations that Congress formulates national policy and mediates state-federal relationships; it poses a challenge to popular suggestions that the president is engaged in unilateral action; and it comes as a surprise to those who have studied executive federalism but insist it is the peculiar province of parliamentary federations. In an age of partisan polarization, congressional gridlock, and state initiative, executive federalism has come to America. After describing the emerging practice of American executive federalism and the collaboration and contestation it entails, this article offers a qualified defense. It suggests that executive federalism facilitates a form of governance suited to polarization: state-differentiated national policy. It argues that executive federalism offers a promising forum for bipartisan compromise because it involves iterative, relatively nontransparent interactions among disaggregated government actors. And it makes a case for executive federalism in terms of democratic representation notwithstanding obvious shortcomings. The article also questions some widespread doctrinal assumptions. In particular, it proposes that federalism might enhance, rather than diminish, federal agencies' claims to Chevron deference, and it advocates judicial receptivity to federal executive involvement in interstate agreements.

Responding to Heather K. Gerken's Childress Lecture, Federalism and Nationalism: Time for a Détente? In this response, I consider how the nationalist school of federalism reconceptualizes nationalism, and not only federalism. Taking as my starting point Gerken's claim that federalism can be good for nationalism, that nationalists should "believe in giving power to the states," I first outline two possible understandings of nationalism suggested by this claim — that "national" refers to the federal government, and that "national" refers to a unified American polity — and explain what it would mean for federalism to serve nationalism so understood. After rejecting both accounts, I sketch the view of nationalism I propose we continue to develop. It is a nationalism that is ineluctably pluralist, one that recognizes multiple and competing national interests, institutions, and constituencies. In brief, then, this response proposes that we do for nationalism what scholars — Gerken foremost among them — have recently been doing for federalism. If important pieces have examined the multiple ways in which states exercise power without separate spheres of action, more work needs to study the effects of state-federal integration on our nationalism. We must grapple with the diversity of the national and examine, in particular, how this diversity is itself generated and instantiated by the states.

Secession has been back in the news of late. Hundreds of thousands of individuals across the country signed petitions seeking permission for their states to leave the United States after President Obama's reelection; Governor Perry riffed on Texas's departure from the Union "if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people"; and members of the Second Vermont Republic insist the Green Mountain State would be better off alone. Overseas, a bid for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom nearly prevailed last fall.

Among the questions that vex the federalism literature are why states check the federal government and whether Americans identify with the states as well as the nation. This Article argues that partisanship supplies the core of an answer to both questions. Competition between today's ideologically coherent, polarized parties leads state actors to make demands for autonomy, to enact laws rejected by the federal government, and to fight federal programs from within. States thus check the federal government by channeling partisan conflict through federalism's institutional framework. Partisanship also recasts the longstanding debate about whether Americans identify with the states. Democratic and Republican, not state and national, are today's political identities, but the state and federal governments are sites of partisan affiliation. As these governments advance distinct partisan positions, individuals identify with them in shifting, variable ways; states loom particularly large when they are controlled by the party out of power in Washington. States also serve as laboratories of national partisan politics by facilitating competition within each political party. In so doing, they participate in national political contest without forfeiting the particularity and pluralism we associate with the local. By instantiating different partisan positions, moreover, states generate a federalist variant of surrogate representation: individuals across the country may affiliate with states they do not inhabit based on their partisan commitments. Attending to the intersection of partisanship and federalism has implications for a number of doctrinal controversies, such as campaign finance across state lines and access to state public records. The analysis here suggests that porous state borders may enhance states' ability to challenge the federal government and to serve as sites of political identification.