Effect of Provision on Constitution
The Court overruled National League of Cities in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Auth. Justice Blackmun’s opinion for the Court in Garcia concluded that the National League of Cities test for ”integral operations in areas of traditional governmental functions” had proven ”both impractical and doctrinally barren,” and that the Court in 1976 had ”tried to repair what did not need repair.”
With only passing reference to the Tenth Amendment the Court nonetheless clearly reverted to the Madisonian view of the Amendment reflected in Unites States v. Darby. States retain a significant amount of sovereign authority ”only to the extent that the Constitution has not divested them of their original powers and transferred those powers to the Federal Government.” The principal restraints on congressional exercise of the Commerce power are to be found not in the Tenth Amendment or in the Commerce Clause itself, but in the structure of the Federal Government and in the political processes.
”Freestanding conceptions of state sovereignty” such as the National League of Cities test subvert the federal system by ” inviting an unelected federal judiciary to make decisions about which state policies it favors and which ones it dislikes.”
While continuing to recognize that ”Congress’ authority under the Commerce Clause must reflect [the] position. That the States occupy a special and specific position in our constitutional system,” the Court held that application of Fair Labor Standards Act minimum wage and overtime provisions to state employment does not require identification of these ”affirmative limits.” In sum, the Court in Garcia seems to have said that most but not necessarily all disputes over the effects on state sovereignty of federal commerce power legislation are to be considered political questions. What it would take for legislation to so threaten the ‘’special and specific position” that states occupy in the constitutional system as to require judicial rather than political resolution was not delineated.
The first indication was that it would take a very unusual case indeed. In South Carolina v. Baker the Court expansively interpreted Garcia as meaning that there must be an allegation of ‘’some extraordinary defects in the national political process” before the Court will apply substantive judicial review standards to claims that Congress has regulated state activities in violation of the Tenth Amendment.
A claim that Congress acted on incomplete information would not suffice, the Court noting that South Carolina had ”not even alleged that it was deprived of any right to participate in the national political process or that it was singled out in a way that left it politically isolated and powerless.” Thus, the general rule was that ”limits on Congress’ authority to regulate state activities. are structural, not substantive, that States must find their protection from congressional regulation through the national political process, not through judicially defined spheres of unregulable state activity.”
