The Supreme Court cases involving the Tenth Amendment trace a long argument over where federal power ends and state authority begins. The amendment’s text is short: powers not given to the federal government, and not denied to the states, belong to the states or the people.1Congress.gov. Constitution of the United States – Amendment 10 What that means in practice has changed dramatically over more than a century, from a robust barrier to federal legislation, to a near-meaningless footnote, and back to a doctrine with real force in specific areas. The rulings below are the ones that did the shaping.
The Early Swing: From Barrier to Truism
Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918)
For much of American history, the Court treated the Tenth Amendment as a genuine limit on Congress. Hammer is the clearest example. The Court struck down a federal law banning the interstate shipment of goods produced by child labor, holding that manufacturing is not interstate commerce and that regulating factory working conditions was a power “carefully reserved to the States.”2Justia. Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918) Congress could regulate goods crossing state lines but could not use that power to reach how those goods were made.
United States v. Darby (1941)
The pendulum swung hard the other way in Darby. A Georgia lumber manufacturer challenged the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set minimum wages and maximum hours for workers producing goods shipped across state lines. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law and overruled Hammer. Justice Stone dismissed the Tenth Amendment in a single paragraph, calling it “but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered.”3Justia. United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100 (1941) The amendment, in the Court’s view, added nothing to the Constitution. It simply restated the obvious. For roughly the next fifty years, almost no federal law was struck down on Tenth Amendment grounds.
Who Can Bring a Tenth Amendment Challenge
Bond v. United States (2011)
A threshold question sat unresolved for decades: does an individual person have standing to raise a Tenth Amendment argument, or is that a right belonging only to state governments? Bond answered it. A woman prosecuted under a federal chemical weapons statute for spreading toxic chemicals on surfaces her romantic rival would touch argued that Congress had reached into an area of state criminal law. The government said only a state could raise that objection. The Court rejected that argument unanimously, holding that federalism protections are not solely a right of the states. When the federal government exceeds its enumerated powers, anyone injured by that overreach can challenge it.4Justia. Bond v. United States, 564 U.S. 211 (2011) Criminal defendants, businesses, and ordinary people can invoke the amendment without waiting for their state to sue.
The Anti-Commandeering Trilogy
The most important modern development in Tenth Amendment law is the anti-commandeering doctrine: the federal government cannot force state governments to carry out federal programs. Three cases built it, and each one extended the principle.
New York v. United States (1992)
Facing a shortage of disposal sites for low-level radioactive waste, Congress passed a law giving states three “incentives” to deal with the problem. The first two were carrots. The third was a stick: any state that failed to arrange for disposal of its waste by a deadline would be forced to take legal ownership of that waste and assume all liability. New York challenged that “take-title” provision. Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion held that the federal government “may not compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.” The take-title provision gave states a false choice, and it undermined political accountability by hiding which level of government was actually responsible for the policy.5Justia. New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992)
Printz v. United States (1997)
New York established that Congress cannot conscript state legislatures. Printz extended the principle to state executive officials. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act required local law enforcement officers to conduct background checks on prospective gun buyers as an interim measure. Two county sheriffs challenged the requirement. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion held that Congress lacks the constitutional authority to compel state officers to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program, even when the task is straightforward and ministerial.6Justia. Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997) Congress can encourage state cooperation, and it can build its own enforcement apparatus, but it cannot draft state employees as unpaid federal agents.
Murphy v. NCAA (2018)
The earlier cases involved Congress ordering states to do something. Murphy asked whether Congress could order states not to do something. The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act made it unlawful for states to “authorize by law” sports gambling. New Jersey wanted to legalize sports betting and argued that the federal law commandeered its legislature. The federal government said the statute did not require states to take any affirmative action, only prohibited them from passing a particular law. The Court called that distinction “empty.” Whether Congress compels a state to enact legislation or forbids it from doing so, the result is the same: a direct order to a state legislature.7Justia. Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 584 U.S. (2018) The ruling opened the door to state-by-state sports betting laws and confirmed that anti-commandeering applies to federal mandates and federal prohibitions alike.
Where Anti-Commandeering Stops
Reno v. Condon (2000)
Not every federal rule that touches state government is commandeering. The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act restricted how states could share or sell personal information from driver’s license databases. South Carolina challenged the law. The Court unanimously upheld it. The statute did not require states to pass any law or to enforce a federal program against their citizens. It regulated states “as owners of databases,” restricting what they could do with information they had already collected.8Justia. Reno v. Condon, 528 U.S. 141 (2000) Congress cannot conscript states into administering federal policy, but it can regulate state activity directly when a state is acting more like a market participant than a sovereign regulator.
The Commerce Clause and State Sovereignty
The Commerce Clause has been the single biggest source of Tenth Amendment litigation. Three cases show how sharply the Court’s approach has shifted.
National League of Cities v. Usery (1976)
After decades of treating the Tenth Amendment as dormant, the Court used it to strike down a federal law for the first time since the New Deal era. Congress had extended the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage and overtime requirements to state and local government employees, including police officers, firefighters, and sanitation workers. The Court held that applying federal wage-and-hour rules to “traditional governmental functions” exceeded Congress’s commerce power.9Justia. National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U.S. 833 (1976) The problem was that no one could reliably say what counted as a “traditional governmental function,” and lower courts produced inconsistent results.
Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985)
Nine years later, the Court overruled National League of Cities. The San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority argued that running a public bus system was a traditional governmental function and thus immune from federal wage laws. The Court decided the entire framework was unworkable and abandoned it.10Justia. Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U.S. 528 (1985) Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion took a different approach to protecting state sovereignty. The Framers designed the federal government itself to protect the states: states elect representatives and senators, control electoral qualifications, and hold equal representation in the Senate. Those structural features, not judicial review, were supposed to be the primary safeguard. States that dislike a federal law should look to Congress, not the courts. Garcia remains good law, though later anti-commandeering rulings restored judicial protection along a different doctrinal path.
Gonzales v. Raich (2005)
Raich tested whether the Tenth Amendment could protect state marijuana laws from federal enforcement. California had legalized medical marijuana, and two patients who grew cannabis at home for personal medical use challenged the federal Controlled Substances Act as applied to their activity. The Court ruled 6-3 against them. Congress could regulate even local, noncommercial activity if it was part of a broader class of activities with a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Homegrown marijuana could affect national supply and demand, so Congress could reach it as part of its comprehensive drug-control scheme.11Justia. Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005) State legalization does not insulate anyone from federal prosecution, although federal enforcement priorities have shifted since the decision.
Federal Spending Power and Coercion
Congress does not always regulate the states directly. Often it attaches conditions to federal money: take the funds, follow the rules. The Tenth Amendment limits this power too.
South Dakota v. Dole (1987)
Congress directed the Secretary of Transportation to withhold a percentage of federal highway funds from any state that allowed people under twenty-one to buy or publicly possess alcohol. South Dakota, which permitted nineteen-year-olds to buy beer, challenged the law. The Court upheld the condition and laid out the framework that still governs spending-power cases. Congress may attach conditions to federal funds if those conditions serve the general welfare, are stated unambiguously, bear some relationship to the federal interest in the funded program, and do not cross into coercion. South Dakota stood to lose only five percent of its federal highway money, which the Court called “relatively mild encouragement.”12Library of Congress. South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987)
NFIB v. Sebelius (2012)
For twenty-five years after Dole, no spending condition was struck down as coercive. That changed with the challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. The ACA required states to extend Medicaid eligibility to a much larger population. States that refused would lose not just the new expansion funding but all of their existing Medicaid funding, which for many states represented over ten percent of their total budgets. Seven justices agreed this crossed the line. Threatening to strip states of all existing Medicaid funding left them “no real option but to acquiesce.”13Justia. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012) The federal government could offer the new expansion money with conditions, but it could not yank decades of existing funding to punish states that declined. For the first time, the Court set an enforceable ceiling on how much financial pressure Congress can apply.14Congressional Research Service. Medicaid and Federal Grant Conditions After NFIB v. Sebelius
What Counts as a Reserved Power
U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton (1995)
Not every Tenth Amendment case involves Congress reaching too far. Sometimes states try to claim powers the Constitution never gave them. Arkansas amended its state constitution to impose term limits on its members of Congress, and twenty-two other states had passed similar measures. Supporters argued that setting qualifications for federal officeholders was a reserved state power. The Court disagreed, 5-4. The Constitution lists specific qualifications for members of Congress: minimum age, citizenship, and residency. Those qualifications are exclusive, and the power to add to them was not among the “original powers” states possessed before ratification.15Justia. U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779 (1995) Electing representatives to a national legislature was a new right created by the Constitution itself, so it was never a state power that could be “reserved.” The decision invalidated term-limit provisions in twenty-three states and established that the amendment only reserves powers that predated the Constitution.
How These Cases Fit Together
Read in sequence, the decisions are less contradictory than they first appear. A few principles now coexist. Congress has broad power to regulate interstate commerce and to attach conditions to federal spending, and the Tenth Amendment does not independently limit those powers when they are validly exercised (Darby, Garcia, Raich). Congress cannot use those powers to commandeer state governments into doing federal work, whether by mandate or by prohibition (New York, Printz, Murphy). It cannot regulate states in ways that only make sense as commandeering, but it can regulate them directly when they act like other actors in the market (Reno v. Condon). It cannot make spending conditions so punishing that states lose any real ability to say no (NFIB v. Sebelius). The amendment reserves to states only those powers that genuinely predated the Constitution (Thornton). And individuals, not just states, can invoke these protections in court (Bond). The tension between federal authority and state sovereignty remains unresolved by design, and each new case adds another data point to a line that continues to move with the composition of the Court and the political questions of the moment.