ABSTRACT

National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 US 833, was the first case since New Deal era in which the US Supreme Court declared unconstitutional congressional exercise of the Commerce Clause power. At issue in the case was the permissible scope of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which had been amended in 1974 to include employment standards for state and local government workers. The Court's majority opinion, by then-Justice William H. Rehnquist, spelled out a vision of federalism much at odds with the post–New Deal consensus on Court. Justice Rehnquist did not provide a great deal of evidence to suggest that the Constitution's authors explicitly sought to protect state sovereignty. He relied instead upon the tradition of Court to respect state sovereignty in the past. Much of the Commerce Clause expansion that typified the post-New Deal certainly offended what might be labeled state sovereignty, but did so generally by means of preempting or overruling what was traditionally state jurisdiction.