Michael Greve argues that the Constitution's framers designed a federal system where states would compete for citizens and businesses, with this competition disciplining government and protecting liberty. He traces how this competitive federalism was inverted into a cooperative system where federal and state governments work together to expand their powers, with interest groups leveraging access at multiple levels to achieve what they couldn't win in any single arena. The book examines specific mechanisms of this transformation: unfunded mandates, conditional grants, regulatory preemption that sets floors rather than ceilings, and the expansion of federal judicial review. Greve, a legal scholar at George Mason University, argues that these developments were not mandated by the Constitution's text or structure but resulted from political choices that could have gone differently. His analysis challenges both conservative nostalgia for a pristine constitutional order and progressive confidence that federal power necessarily advances social justice. The book is dense with constitutional doctrine and legal history, tracing Supreme Court decisions across multiple areas of law to show patterns in how federalism has evolved. Greve proposes reforms to restore competitive pressures, though he acknowledges the political difficulty of reversing established arrangements. Readers interested in constitutional law, federalism, or the structure of American government will find a provocative argument about how the system we have diverged from the system the framers designed.