As people sift through the debris of the Supreme Court decision on federal health care law, the question that is coming up in a few places (such as Mark Walsh’s article this morning inEd Week, in Rick Hess’s blog, and on Twitter) is whether the part of the ruling on Medicaid expansion has implications for other federal applications of the spending clause. By a 7-2 majority, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not threaten all of a state’s Medicaid funding if the state refused to join the expansion provision. The healthy majority on this issue implies this is a potential area of new interest by the Supreme Court in examining federally-funded programs.

This may apply to No Child Left Behind in terms of the dramatic changes it made in requirements of the states. When Connecticut sued the federal government in 2005,¹ then-state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal argued two points: first, that Margaret Spellings unreasonably and capriciously denied the state’s request to test on non-consecutive years and to test English language learners and students with disabilities at instructional levels rather than grade levels; second, that the testing mandates violated the Unfunded Mandates Provision of NCLB. The district court dismissed the case in 2006 and again in 2008, on the interpretation of NCLB’s statutory language in the first argument and on being premature in the second (the state had not complained to Spellings about the unfunded mandate issue before suing). Essentially, District Judge Mark Kravitz left the ball in the Department of Education’s court to address Connecticut’s unfunded-mandate complaint and left the door open to another lawsuit should the issue be unresolved.

That door is wide open today and probably does not need action by the Department of Education for a party with standing to assert that NCLB goes too far with additional mandates. Blumenthal’s 2005 complaint was crafted not to undermine the standard interpretation of the spending clause or the gist of NCLB, but that caution may be thrown to the winds by another state official who wants to challenge the additional requirements using yesterday’s decision as a basis. It is clear that NCLB added substantial chunks of requirements to Title I funding, and in light of yesterday’s ruling on the Medicaid expansion, it is not clear which of those requirements might survive court scrutiny.

Notes

1. State of Connecticut v. Spellings, dismissed in 2006 by the District Court with an expanded opinion in 2008. [↩]