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Medical marijuana has emerged as one of the key federalism battlegrounds of the last two decades. Since 1996, sixteen states have passed new laws legalizing the drug for certain medical purposes.' All the while, the federal government has remained committed to zero-tolerance, prohibiting the possession, cultivation, and distribution of marijuana for any purpose.2 The federal government's uncompromising stance against medical marijuana seemingly exposes the states' vulnerability to the whims of the national political process, and it has inspired calls for the courts to step in and protect state experimentation from this and other instances of arguable congressional over-reaching.

Scholars have challenged the notion of "political safeguards of federalism" in a large and well-developed body of work on the use of coercive policy tools by the federal government. This study suggests, however, that there may be some utility in re-examining the political factors that help to constrain the growth of national power. Specifically, it argues that the need to win votes from subnational constituencies makes national lawmakers less supportive of mandates, preemptions, and tax sanctions during election cycles and, thus, provides an intermittent safeguard of state authority. It tests and finds evidence for hypotheses related to that general argument in analyses of the passage of coercive federalist policies over the last thirty years. Adapted from the source document.

Recent media reports imply that corporations, industry groups, and think tanks exercise outsized influence in state legislatures by promoting model legislation. Before making sweeping claims about how special interests dominate the legislative process, it is essential to compare their purported influence to that of other sources. This article performs such a comparison by applying textual analysis to two original datasets—one including over 2400 state bills that challenge 12 national policies and one including more than 1000 model bills. It finds that lawmakers are more likely to develop legislation internally or rely on legislation from other states than to use model bills. These results suggest that while special interests can sometimes exploit the safeguards of federalism to advance their partisan goals, that dynamic is far from the norm.