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24 

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

State’s legislature.  Id., at 505  Significantly, the only con-
sequence for a State’s breach of the use condition was con-
tractual  in  nature—“the  grant  to  such  State  shall  cease;
and said State shall be bound to pay the United States the
amount received of any lands previously sold.”  Id., at 504– 
505.  The Second Morrill Act, enacted in 1890, followed the 
same framework, donating money for the endowment of ag-
ricultural and mechanical arts colleges, subject to the con-
dition that black students not be excluded.  Ch. 841, 26 Stat. 
417.  Like  the  First  Morrill  Act,  the  only  consequence  for 
noncompliance  was  that  future  appropriations  under  the 
Act would cease until the State brought itself into compli-
ance.  Id., at 419. 

In the early 20th century, the adoption of the Sixteenth 
Amendment and the national income tax vastly expanded 
the revenue available to the Federal Government.  But the 
increasingly  ambitious  spending  programs  that  followed 
did  not  break  the  contractual  pattern  established  by  the
Morrill  Acts.  Thus,  early-20th-century  highway  grants
took the form of an offer to enter a contract, with the conse-
quence of noncompliance being the cutoff of federal funds. 
See Corwin, 36 Harv. L. Rev., at 574, n. 72 (describing Fed-
eral Highway Act of 1916); see also id., at 573–575 (collect-
ing other examples).

Even  in  the  New  Deal  era,  advocates  of  far-reaching
spending programs continued to understand the spending 
power as a mere power of appropriation.  Professor Corwin, 
for example, recognized that the States must be depended
upon to exercise the legislative power needed to implement 
such  programs.    Thus,  “federal  highway  construction  re-
lie[d] on the state power of eminent domain, as well as on
state power to police and protect highways during and after 
their  construction.”    National-State  Cooperation—Its  Pre-
sent Possibilities, 46 Yale L. J. 599, 617 (1937).  Similarly,
national protection of forests depended on “the power of the 
states to regulate the conduct of persons entering forests,”