Coercive Federalism and the Search for Constitutional Limits

This article explores several constitutional bases for questioning the federal government's use of unfunded mandates and other forms of coercive intergovernmental regulation. The “anti-coercion” and “anti-commandeering” principles of the Tenth Amendment are proposed as general arguments against these forms of regulation. The constitutional requirement of “uniformity” attached to indirect taxation, the “anti-discrimination rule” in the area of intergovernmental tax immunity, and the “equality rule”, which stems from the unwritten tradition of maintaining equality among the states, are developed as additional bases for striking down federal laws that distribute mandate burdens disproportionately among the states.