There Are 90k Governments in the US?!?! | Power and Politics in US Government 26 of 30 | Study Hall

to learn more about earning college credits with study hall courses go to ghost study hall.com or click the link in the description ebus Unum out of many one it's been one of the modos of the us since the very beginning but do you ever wonder if the framers thought about just how many that many would become creating the United States of America brought together 2.5 million people living across 13 colonies but as of 2023 there are over 335 million people living in the US within the 50 states our

territories and the District of Columbia and all of those people in all of those places have needs and ideas and opinions that need to be heard and addressed which is why we don't have just one government doing it all we have more than 990,000 of them you heard that right we have over 90,000 governments and while 90,000 is a lot less than 335 million it's still a lot more than one I was a journalism major and even I can do that math which means there are still a lot of different opinions and ide

as and agendas in one country and it can be a bit of a tight squeeze hi I'm Chris Vasquez and this is study hall power and politics in US [Music] government the Constitution doesn't actually say much about local government but states have pretty much always had subdivisions below the state government level and by subdivisions I don't mean fancy suburbs just lower levels of government Virginia first divided itself into four subdivisions in 1618 and then into eight shes or counties in 1634 this Co

unty structure was modeled after Middle Earth I mean England which had been using them since the Middle Ages but even though we've been breaking the country up in this way forever that doesn't mean we've exactly figured out the division of power and authority between all these different pieces and the lack of specificity in the Constitution means that states are pretty free to delegate Powers responsibility and authority to local governments like counties cities and Special Districts which can l

ead to some confusion there are two main philosophies to explain how States delegate their power to lower levels of government the first is called Dylan's Rule and is named after John F Dillan a Justice on the Iowa Supreme Court in the 1860s he wrote that local governments and municipalities derive their power from the state local governments are an extension of the state and they exist so long as the state lets them the other philosophy is called the home rule Doctrine this comes from something

called the Doctrine which was named for Judge Thomas kolie he was a Justice on the Michigan Supreme Court around the same time Dylan's rule was written he thought that local governments should have their own realm of autonomy so under home rule state and local levels of government have their own separate Powers similar to how the state and federal levels do but in reality it's not one or the other and all states use some mishmash of both local governments have some degree of autonomy and state

governments still have some degree of say over the local governments and that often comes in the form of State preemption the legal definition of preemption is basically that if a law from a lower level of government clashes with law from a higher level of government then the higher level wins out and in recent years we've seen these clashes happen in a variety of ways like take New York for example the New York state constitution has a home rule Clause that gives local governments the power to

create laws related to the protection order conduct safety health and well-being of persons or property so in 2006 then New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned paint kits that could be used to make brightly colored Firearms he wanted to prevent real guns from being mistaken for toys in response as a publicity stunt a Wisconsin company created a gun customization collection named after the five buroughs of New York City Bloomberg didn't find this funny and neither did nearby Nassau County wh

ich introduced an ordinance to ban colored handguns in response to the publicity stunt however under New York state law a person could be licensed to have a colored firearm and the New York Court held that state law preempted County ordinances so the nasau County ordinance was preempted and despite having a home rule statute the state of New York still has authority over City and County laws while this might make things a little more complicated having one final Authority is less confusing than

state and local governments having to battle it out over every little thing but that doesn't mean there aren't still battles and by now you might be thinking my math isn't quite mathing anymore I said there are 990,000 governments in the country and then we started talking about counties but there aren't 90,000 counties in the US there are only around 3,000 which is not even close to 990,000 that is correct the United States also has a lot of Special Districts or small districts created for a sp

ecific and limited purpose they often provide just one service for a specific defined area like Mosquito Abatement in a city no really there are special districts that exist for the sole purpose of controlling the mosquito population in the 2017 Government Census because those happen they counted over 38,000 Special Districts across the country if you're following along with the math that's still not 90,000 it's 41,000 to get from 41,000 to 990,000 we also need to count cities townships Villages

and school districts and I promise you it all adds up to 90,000 the census Said So Special Districts are overseen by a board of directors or Commissioners or some equivalent sometimes those members are appointed by public officials or private groups but others are elected they often can create their own taxes and they provide stuff like airports fire protection libraries sewage irrigation or electric power and Walt Disney World you see Florida has something called the central Florida tourism ov

ersight district and no one really knew it existed until 2022 when Florida Governor Ronda santis started to Feud against the house of mouse at that time it was called the Rey Creek improvement district and it was a special district where Disney could create and maintain its own fire department and zoning and follow a separate building code instead of the Florida building code that applies to other counties but when Disney criticized the Sis's controversial Bill Banning classroom instruction on g

ender identity and sexual orientation Dan santis threatened to remove Disney's special district status instead the district was restructured as of 2023 the issue still hadn't been entirely resolved but it brought attention to the existence of this specific type of local government it also brought more attention to the tension between state and local powers and that can extend even to the level of towns and cities in a perfect world the state and local governments would work together to best serv

e the residents but we often hear about how the United States is getting more and more polarized with voters moving further apart on the political Spectrum you might think this means the red states are getting redder and the blue states are getting Bluer but looking at the map zoomed out doesn't tell the whole story the electoral map for the 2020 presidential election showed the usual some states were red some were blue and some were stripy to indicate that they flipped from the previous electio

n some states might not surprise you like how Oklahoma is red they voted Republican in every election since 1968 or how Massachusetts is blue they voted Democratic in all but four elections since 1928 but when you zoom in on the states themselves and see how each County voted a different picture emerges Donald Trump won Florida's electoral votes in 2020 but the counties that are home to Florida's capital and four largest cities Tallahassee Jacksonville Miami Tampa and Orlando are blue we see tha

t Trend in Texas too Texas went to Trump in 2020 but the counties that are home to Houston Dallas and Austin are all blue and in states where Biden won the Electoral College when you zoom in the map might show a lot more red than you'd expect like mines V counties are actually mostly red but the state is often blue because of Voters in the Cities Minneapolis St Paul Rochester and Luth as time has gone on demographic shifts have happened with people moving around the country called the big sort l

ike-minded voters have clustered together causing like-minded voting so there's increased polarization between regions not just States and that doesn't just have an impact in federal elections it also affects how local and state governments operate on the one hand you might think that's no problem local governments are the closest to the voters so it's great that they support policies the local voters want but but there's that whole preemption thing we mentioned earlier and an inevitable Clash w

hen a city or county tries to enact policies their state doesn't want for much of the Obama Administration the Democrats didn't have a clear majority in Congress and so they struggled to pass Progressive legislation at the federal level at the same time the Republican party was gaining more power at the state level so city- level governments still controlled by the Democrats began passing legislation to support their Progressive goals and since then states have been passing more and more preempt

ion laws to override city laws for example after the Supreme Court overturned weade in 2022 red states started passing abortion bans then district attorneys in some blue cities announced their intention not to enforce those bans as part of their prosecutorial discretion that's a prosecutor's power to decide whether to bring criminal charges or not in response state legislator used preemption to introduce bills that would force those District Attorneys to enforce the abortion bans and in June 202

3 Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a law that requires cities to get State approval before they can amend their Charters to address climate change he did that in response to activists trying to amend the El Paso City Charter to include climate goals so with all of this going on it can start to feel like maybe there's just too much division like maybe 990,000 is still way too many or the balance of power has gotten off somewhere and maybe the government isn't doing a great job of representing th

e people it's just a lot of pluris to fit into an Unum and as usual there aren't any easy fixes to these complex issues but to paraphrase Shrek the government is like an onion not because it stinks and makes you cry but because it has a lot of layers there's our city level government the county level the state level and the federal level we might even live with within a special district with its own board of directors and for the most part all of those layers work together pretty well to provide

services to their citizens most of the time we don't even notice or think about being wrapped up inside this governmental onion until it starts to rot but it's important to know how all the different governments are supposed to fit together and to understand our place within the onion because local government is still where we have the most say and the best opportunity to have an influence that will help make sure those 990,000 governments are really serving us if you're enjoying study hall pow

er and politics in US government and are interested in taking an online course and Durning college credit go to ghost study hall.com or click the button to learn more thanks for watching see you next time