California’s case
Re “A battle of wills,” Jan. 26
The U.S. Constitution can protect our state against President Trump’s threats to withhold federal funds from so-called sanctuary jurisdictions if we don’t comply with his immigration edicts. In 1999 the U.S. Supreme Court told us in Davis vs. Monroe County that federal spending power, “if wielded without concern for the federal balance, has the potential to obliterate distinctions between national and local … power by permitting the federal government to set policy in the most sensitive areas of traditional state concern.” Those areas include police, safety, health, transportation, welfare and more.
Also, though federal money can be granted with conditions attached, the Court reiterated in the 2012 case concerning the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate that “any such conditions must be unambiguous so that a state at least knows what it is getting into.” Undoubtedly, the federal laws under which California receives the money in question do not hint that it could be taken away if a state doesn’t comply with a president’s immigration demands.
Finally, in the 1937 case Steward Machine case, the Court held that conditions on federal money “may not cross the point at which pressure turns into compulsion” against the states. The Court relied on this principle in the healthcare case to strike down forced Medicaid expansion in the states; California could be protected similarly.
The writer teaches constitutional law at Peoples College of Law in Los Angeles.