Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-806_2dp3.pdf
Page Number: 67.0

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

35 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

is nothing more than the power to spend.  It neither con-
tains nor implies any sovereign regulatory power to legis-
late rights and duties with the force of federal law, and the 
regulated  party’s  consent  cannot  change  that  conclusion.
The contractual nature of the spending power was essential 
to  the  Government’s  defense  and  this  Court’s  approval  of
far-reaching  spending  programs;  the  programs  survived
only  with  that  traditional  understanding  as  a  premise.16 
The Federal Government and private litigants cannot now 
discard  that  understanding  to  argue  that  such  programs
impose obligations directly on the States that are enforcea-
ble  against  state  and  local  officials  under  §1983,  without 
running  headlong  into  the  anticommandeering  doctrine
and  long-recognized  limitations  on  the  federal  spending 
power. 

* 

* 

* 

By holding that FNHRA creates rights enforceable under 
§1983, the majority creates a grave constitutional problem 
that  cannot  be  brushed  away  with  a  mere  incantation  of 
Thiboutot.  As explained above, spending-power legislation
cannot “secure” rights “by law.”  Conditions on a State’s re-
ceipt of federal funds are effective, not by virtue of federal 
law, but by dint of a federal-state agreement.  The very con-
stitutionality of such conditions depends on their eschewal
of securing rights and imposing concomitant obligations on 

—————— 
p. 12, n. 6. 

16 Ironically, decades after it expressly disclaimed the pre-emptive ef-
fect of spending conditions in defending their constitutionality, see su-
pra, at 26–28, the Federal Government argued the exact opposite in Gon-
zaga:  “The  Act  of  Congress  establishing  the  program  remains  binding
law  with  the  full  force  and  preemptive  authority  of  federal  legislation
under the Supremacy Clause, and thus falls squarely within the ‘laws’ 
covered by Section 1983 and is fully capable of ‘secur[ing]’ rights.”  Brief 
for United States as Amicus Curiae in No. 01–679, p. 19 (alteration in 
original).  With this reversal, the Government unwittingly argued that 
spending conditions are unconstitutional.