Compliance Incentives

May 17, 2005 12:10 PM

Anyone happen to remember which Supreme Court case dealt with federal funding going to states that complied with guidelines, and specified that the funding incentives had to be related to the guideline (ie, money for highways if you instituted a speed limit is OK, but money for highways if your public school test scores were past a minimum is not OK)?
posted by kafziel to law & government (2 comments total)

The case you want is South Dakota v. Dole.
posted by amber_dale at 12:14 PM on May 17, 2005

Thanks, a_d. I learned something here:

Moreover, the relatively small financial inducement offered by Congress here [...] is not so coercive as to pass the point at which pressure turns into compulsion.

As a public library board member, I fought tooth and nail against the recent CIPA legistlation, but to no avail. The loss of all our eRate funding was completely coercive. It was filter or lose connection. The decision made by our local cooperative was complete based upon economics - 30-some libraries would lose all internet connections, including on-line cataloguing if we did not apply the government filters.

Now, I'm sure that there was some sort of tap dance around the above, since I never heard it mentioned during the challenges.

This issue, and others like it that we've run into, has turned a once formerly genial Democrat into a raving states-righter. The parties are completely hypocritical and it makes my blood boil to see the things that they are doing under the 'best intentions' method of government. Leave us alone!
posted by unixrat at 12:53 PM on May 17, 2005