Conditional Spending and the (General) Conditional Offer Puzzle

Abstract

There are two basic ways to think about the constitutionality of conditional funding offers from the national government to the states: as a localized problem subject to a localized solution, or as instantiating a broader problem subject to a more general analysis. The first perspective views conditional spending grants as, essentially, an issue of federalism. The second views it under the rubric of what is sometimes called “the unconstitutional conditions problem” or (preferably) “the conditional offer puzzle.”

In last year’s health care decision, the Court adopted the first approach — the “particularist perspective.” That is, all Justices analyzed the constitutionality of the Medicaid expansion by reference to concepts, tests, and principles that, as far as the several opinions revealed, the authors thought particular to conditional funding grants offered from the federal government to the states. No Justices drew upon, or sought to further develop, principles or analytical frameworks that purported to be general in the sense of applying to other sorts of conditional offers of benefits — for example, conditional proposals made to individuals rather than to states, or made from state governments rather than from the national government, or made of an offer to provide some benefit other than cash or cash equivalent. This essay, prepared for an edited volume of essays concerning the health care decision, argues that the unsatisfactoriness of the Court’s analysis of the Medicaid expansion can be traced to its adoption of the particularist approach to the conditional spending problem, and it explores the “generalist” alternative of analyzing the conditional spending problem as a subtype of the more general conditional offer puzzle. The generalist alternative I offer rests upon a distinction between coercion and compulsion, along with an account of what it means to “penalize” the exercise of a right. I conclude both that those who support the Affordable Care Act should treat the states’ challenge with greater seriousness than, by and large, they have given it, and that those who already harbored doubts about the constitutionality of the Medicaid expansion have reason to be more sympathetic to a general solution to the conditional offer puzzle than was the Supreme Court.