Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-806_2dp3.pdf
Page Number: 64.0

32 

HEALTH AND HOSPITAL CORPORATION OF MARION 
CTY. v. TALEVSKI 
THOMAS, J., dissenting 

The  traditional  understanding  of  both  the  spending
power and §1983 began slowly eroding in the 1950s, 1960s,
and  1970s,  culminating  in  Thiboutot.  On  the  spending-
power side, the Court held in Cannon v. University of Chi-
cago, 441 U. S. 677 (1979), that the spending conditions of 
Title IX of the Education Amendments created binding du-
ties on private universities, the violation of which could be
the ground of a federal lawsuit by a private party.  In doing 
so, the Court “simply ignored the crucial difference between
restraints accepted as conditions of funding, and restraints 
imposed by virtue of a legislative power.”  Engdahl, 52 S. D. 
L. Rev., at 509.  And, on the §1983 side, the Court had con-
sidered  a  number  of  suits  against  state  officials  for  viola-
tions of the Social Security Act without analyzing their cog-
nizability  under  §1983.  See  Thiboutot,  448  U. S.,  at  6 
(collecting  cases);  id.,  at  26  (Powell,  J.,  dissenting)  (“Far 
from being a long-accepted fact, purely statutory §1983 ac-
tions are an invention of the last 20 years”).

The stage was thus set for Thiboutot to discard nearly two
centuries  of  settled  spending-power  doctrine  by  holding 
that federal spending conditions secure rights by law.  Ig-
noring  both  the  contractual  nature  of  spending  programs
and the enforcement-power-based understanding of §1983, 
Thiboutot declared that “the plain language of the statute 
undoubtedly embrace[d] respondents’ claim that [the State] 
violated the Social Security Act.”  Id., at 4 (majority opin-
ion).  The centerpiece of the Court’s opinion was its impre-
cise framing of the relevant question: “whether the phrase
‘and laws,’ as used in §1983, means what it says, or whether
it  should  be  limited  to  some  subset  of  laws.”  Ibid.   After 
framing the issue thus, the Court reasoned that nothing in 
the  legislative  history  compelled  limiting  the  term  “and 
laws” to civil rights laws enacted under the Reconstruction 

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regulate  States—the  commandeering  framework  might  apply  differ-
ently—or not at all.