Law Commons^™

The Health Care Cases And The New Meaning Of Commandeering, Bradley Joondeph

Bradley W. Joondeph

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Health Care Cases to sustain the central provisions of the Affordable Care Act (or ACA) was hugely important in several ways. Most commentators have focused on the Court’s upholding of the ACA’s minimum coverage provision. But the Court’s Medicaid holding—that the ACA coerced (and thus commandeered) the states by making their preexisting Medicaid funds contingent on the states’ expanding their programs—may actually be more significant as a matter of constitutional law.

The basic thesis of this article is that, in finding the ACA’s Medicaid expansion provisions coercive, the Court has re-conceptualized what constitutes a …

Conditional Spending, Coercion, And Commandeering: The Affordable Care Act And The Federal Regulation Of State Taxation, Bradley W. Joondeph

Bradley W. Joondeph

In their constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act (or ACA), the twenty-six states party to Florida v. HHS contend that the ACA’s amendments to Medicaid amount to an impermissible “commandeering” of the states. Specifically, they argue that, though the ACA’s Medicaid provisions are not mandatory in form, they are “in fact”; the sheer volume of the federal funding at stake leaves them with no practical capacity to withdraw from Medicaid. The states’ claim thus poses a very basic question of constitutional law, which the Supreme Court has yet to squarely answer: can conditions imposed on state governments pursuant to …

The Partisan Dimensions Of Federal Preemption In The United States Courts Of Appeals, Bradley Joondeph

Bradley W. Joondeph

This paper explores some of these empirical uncertainties surrounding the political dimensions of preemption in the federal courts. More concretely, it presents a statistical study of every preemption decision rendered by the United States Courts of Appeals from January 1, 2005, to December 31, 2009, a total of 560 decisions and just over 1,700 judicial votes. And these data tell a story consisting of two distinct parts. The first part is that preemption disputes seem to produce a large measure of judicial consensus. In the full universe of cases, there is only a slight difference between Republican and Democratic appointees: …

Federalism, The Rehnquist Court, And The Modern Republican Party, Bradley W. Joondeph

Bradley W. Joondeph

Most scholars agree that federalism was central to the Rehnquist Court’s constitutional agenda. But there is a part of the federalism story that has been largely overlooked: the Court's decisions involving the structural constraints on state governments, the most significant of which are preemption and the dormant Commerce Clause. This article makes two empirical claims about the Rehnquist Court’s federalism jurisprudence, one descriptive and one interpretive. The descriptive claim is that that the Court’s overall approach to federalism was more complicated than many have assumed, and it was not necessarily friendly to the states. To support this contention, I present …