National League of Cities v. Usery

In 1938, during a tidal wave of legislative action associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA established minimum-wage provisions, requiring employers to pay their workers a certain hourly figure. Likewise, it set the wage scale for overtime, which it defined as anything over 40 hours per week, as one and a half times the regular hourly rate. The Court would later identify the purpose behind the latter provision: to provide a disincentive for employers to keep any one employee on the job more than 40 hours a week. Like much of the legislation arising from those years, the FLSA expanded the power of the federal government over business and industry; as for state, county, and municipal governments, however, the act explicitly excluded these entities from its purview.

Starting in 1961, Congress began to amend the act, extending its provisions to include employees in the public as well as the private sector. In 1966, employees of state hospitals, institutions, and schools were placed under the act, and the Supreme Court recognized the constitutionality of these and the 1961 provisions in its 1968 Maryland v. Wirtz ruling. Then in 1974, Congress further amended the act, defining "employer" in such a way that the term would include "a public agency," a designation identified as "the Government of the United States, the government of a State or political subdivision thereof . . . " Thus the wage and hour provisions of the FLSA were extended to include virtually all employees working for states or their political subdivisions.

To state and local governments, and to organizations such as the National League of Cities, the amendment to the FLSA seemed to be a violation of the Tenth Amendment. The latter, the last of the Bill of Rights passed in 1791, states simply that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Together with the National Governor's Conference and various city and state governments, the National League brought a legal action in the District Court for the District of Columbia. The named respondent was President Gerald R. Ford's Secretary of Labor, W. J. Usery, Jr., who would later enjoy recognition as the chief negotiator between the owners and the players' union in the 1994 Major League Baseball strike.

In their suit, the appellants asked for declaratory and injunctive relief against the application of the amendments to them. But a three-judge panel ruled in favor of the secretary of labor, and granted his motion to dismiss the complaint due to the appellants' inability to state a claim on which relief might be granted. The district court in its ruling did, however, state that it was "troubled" by the appellants' claims that the amended FLSA would impede their ability to carry on essential government functions, a subject that would later catch the attention of Justice Rehnquist for the Supreme Court. The district court judged these contentions "substantial," and observed that "it may well be that the Supreme Court will feel it appropriate to draw back from the far-reaching implications" of its ruling in Maryland v. Wirtz. "But that is a decision," the lower court held, "that only the Supreme Court can make . . . "

So the case came before the Court, designated as California v. Usery. The case was argued twice, first on 16 April 1975, and nearly a year later, on 2 March 1976. The appellants on the briefs in the original argument were officials representing the states of Arizona (Bruce Babbitt, future U.S. Senator and later Secretary of the Interior under the Clinton administration), Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire (future U.S. Senator Warren Rudman), Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. On behalf of the appellants, the states of Virginia and New York filed briefs of amici curiae urging reversal, as did the National Association of Counties, the National Institute of Municipal Law Officers, and the Public Service Research Council. On the other side, briefs urging affirmance were filed by officials representing the states of Alabama, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota, as well as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL/CIO), the Coalition of American Public Employees, the International Conference of Police Associations, and the Florida Police Benevolent Association.