<論説>新連邦主義におけるアメリカ連邦権力

Abstract

州政府や地方自治体への連邦補助金は、財政サイドにおけるアメリカ連邦制の中核的メカニズムである。レーガン政権が成立した頃、連邦対内支出の五分の一、州政府・地方自治体支出の四分の一強は連邦補助金が占めていた。この制度は国益を増進する手段の一つとして、リンドン・B・ジョンソン政権期に飛躍的な拡大をみせるが、制度の拡大にともなって、連邦権力の介入という連邦制の本質にかかわる重大な論議をよんだ。各レベル政府間の関係を洗い直し、過去三〇年以上の軌道を根本修正しようとしたニクソンの新連邦主義や、州の留保権限を謳った合衆国憲法修正第一〇条の重要性に関し、国民の注意をとくに喚起したレーガンの新連邦主義は、こうした背景のうえに登場する。本稿はニクソンやレーガンの補助金対策を概観することによって、建前と実際政策との間にどのようなくい違いが見られたかを検討しようとするものである。敷衍すれば、新連邦主義は今世紀アメリカ憲政史の潮流である連邦権力の拡大過程において、どのように位置づけられるかが本稿のポイントであり、さらにこの位置づけに関連して、連邦補助金制度そのものにどのような新現象が生じたのか、国民は連邦政府に何を要求しているのかにも言及する。

The subsidies that the federal government grants to state governments and local municipalities are now the main mechanism of financial inter-governmental relations in the American federalism. In the year when the Reagan administration came, more than a quarter of the total annual expenditures by state and local governments was indeed financed with federal subsidies, which amounted to one fifth of the domestic expenditures of the federal government. To go back into history, those subsidies had tremendously grown during the era of Johnson administration by being encouraged as a means of strengthening national interest, but at the same time their increment aroused a serious question of whether the so much involvement of the federal government in state and local matters could be acceptable or not in view of the nature of federalism. From this background emerged the new federalism as a political doctrine which both the Nixon and Reagan administrations proposed ; the Nixon administration submitted the new federalism fundamentally to put back the trend followed more than thirty years by overhauling inter-governmental relations on each level ; and then the Reagan administration reaffirmed the new federalism so as to require the people to pay attention to the tenth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution declaring the reserved power of state governments. Now this article is to take into examination the actual subsidy policies of both the Nixon and Reagan administrations to make clear the gap between what they asserted and what they did in fact. In other words the point of this article is how to define the new federalism pursued by those two administrations in the light of the tendency of the increasing federal power which has ever been considered as the main current of twentieth century American constitutional history. Incidentally, this article will also describe the new phenomena of federal subsidy system itself under the ascendancy of those two Republican administrations, and finally make a few comments on what role the American people now wish the federal government to play.