Elizabeth Jo

So that's pretty clear.

So really what it's telling Congress is there are certain things you can do, like you can regulate, you know, commerce moving across state lines.

You can tell persons, private entities to do things right to behave in certain ways.

But you can't tell the states.

to do things in ways that are treating them like they're your servants, essentially, right?

That's what the anti-commenteering clause means.

And this idea has also been extended to the spending power, too.

The federal government can certainly offer financial incentives to the states under Congress's spending power, which we find in Article 1, on the condition that the states do what the federal government wants.

Now, it might seem, Roman, like this is

kind of similar to commandeering, right?

Like, well, I can't, you know, we want you to do something, here's some money.

But the idea under federal spending authority is theoretically states have a choice.

Yeah, they can say no.

We don't want to do this.

We don't feel like listening to your federal government.

And because they have a choice, it doesn't raise the same problem.

Except in some cases, the Supreme Court has said that if the choice is not a true choice, in other words, it's really deemed coercive,

that the spending power also can go too far in a way that is similar to the anti-commandeering principle, because you really are forcing the states in a way that they don't want to behave.

And that's essentially why in 2012, the Supreme Court's decision upholding Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, that was the reason that one portion of it was one in which the Supreme Court struck down the way that the ACA expanded funding

Medicaid, right, because it was offering the states money to expand Medicaid.