Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon

Justice Blackmun,

with whom Justice Brennan, Justice Marshall, and Justice Stevens join, dissenting.

I, too, dissent and join Justice Brennan’s opinion. Its exhaustive historical review and analysis demonstrate the Eleventh Amendment error in which the Court today persists. As Justice Brennan shows, if Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U. S. 1 (1890), is a constitutional holding, it then reads into the Amendment words that are not there and that can *303 not be reconciled with any principled view of congressional power; Justice Brennan is surely correct when he says, ante, at 302, that the case rests on “misconceived history and misguided logic.” Thus, the Court today compounds a longstanding constitutional mistake. The shield against just legal obligations afforded the States by the Court’s prevailing construction of the Eleventh Amendment as an “exemplification” of the rule of sovereign immunity, ante, at 239, n. 2, quoting Ex parte New York, 256 U. S. 490, 497 (1921), simply cannot be reconciled with the federal system envisioned by our Basic Document and its Amendments.

Indeed, though of more mature vintage, the Court’s Eleventh Amendment cases spring from the same soil as the Tenth Amendment jurisprudence recently abandoned in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528 (1985). Both in its modern reading of Hans, supra, and in National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U. S. 833 (1976), the Court, in derogation of otherwise unquestioned congressional power, gave broad scope to circumscribed language by reference to principles of federalism said to inform that language. * The intuition underlying Hans and its contemporary progeny is no truer to the federal structure or to a proper view of congressional power than was that underlying National League of Cities .

But I would dissent from the Court’s spare opinion and predictable result on other grounds as well. There is no *304 need to expatiate on them here, where so much already has been written. It suffices to say that I adhere to the views expressed in the dissenting opinion in Edelman v. Jordan, 415 U. S. 651, 688 (1974). See also Florida Dept. of Health v. Florida Nursing Home Assn., 450 U. S. 147, 151 (1981) (dissenting statement). Thus, I would affirm the judgment here on the ground that California, as a willing recipient of federal funds under the Rehabilitation Act, consented to suit when it accepted such assistance. And a fair reading of the statute and its legislative history indicates for me that Congress produced the Act in exercise of its power under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment and thereby abrogated any claim of immunity the State otherwise might raise.

See Fry v. United States, 421 U. S. 542, 557 (1975) (dissenting opinion) (“As it was not the Eleventh Amendment by its terms which justified the result in Hans , it is not the Tenth Amendment by its terms that prohibits congressional action which sets a mandatory ceiling on the wages of all state employees. Both Amendments are simply examples of the understanding of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution that the States were sovereign in many respects, and that although their legislative authority could be superseded by Congress in many areas where Congress was competent to act, Congress was nonetheless not free to deal with a State as if it were just another individual or business enterprise subject to regulation”).