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Comment by epmatsw | Hacker News Reader

This is super interesting. Seems like the real ruling is that the federal government can’t compel states to implement/enforce non-federal laws. I wonder if that will affect things like the drinking age...

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That's been litigated already. If I recall, the drinking age is tied to a state receiving federal money for its highways. And the Court has blessed the power of the federal government to condition the receipt of monies on the state enacting certain restrictions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...

Plus, it doesn't seem like America is politically interested in lowering the drinking age.

Except when it comes to Obamacare and Medicaid.

Same. States don't receive the money when not complied.

The ruling was that the Fed government can’t withhold all Medicaid funding if it wasn’t expanded.

The difference 100% of Medicaid vs 10% of highway funding.

Thus greensoap, the person I responded too, was wrong.

Right! Although, the precise holding in this case actually gets at the opposite (more unusual) situation.

It has already been established that the federal government can't compel states to enact laws or enforce federal ones. [1] (The "federal" drinking age is OK because, IIRC, it was not actually done through direct compulsion, but by conditioning the grant of federal highway funds.) The interesting thing in this case is that the Court has also concluded that the federal government can't forbid a state from enacting a law. Of course, the federal government can still enact its own laws (subject to the Constitution's usual limits on federal power), which would preempt state law. This was a weird case where the federal government tried to do the former but not the latter.

[1] For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printz_v._United_States

For what it's worth, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 was upheld by the Supreme Court in South Dakota v. Dole (1987), a case referenced extensively in the more recent NFIB v. Sebelius, the Obamacare challenge.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Indepen...

> Seems like the real ruling is that the federal government can’t compel states to implement/enforce non-federal laws. I wonder if that will affect things like the drinking age...

(IANAL).

IIRC, that's done by allowing states to set their own drinking age, but withholding federal funds for highways unless the drinking age is at least 21. So any state could set a lower drinking age, legally, but they'd be on the hook for making up the difference in funds from their own budget.

That said, the combination of this decision and the ACA ruling that the federal government couldn't withhold funds from non-participating states may provide ground for a challenge to that law.

What does IANAL stand for? I don’t dare to google for it at work.

I am not a lawyer

What stops states from deciding not to enforce a over 21 limit? They still would have the law on the books.

Nothing. In the same way that states like California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and others have legalized marijuana. Marijuana is still technically illegal, but the federal government has no authority to regulate commerce within the state, and there is no law that stops the flow of federal funds for states which legalize marijuana, in the way that there are laws withholding funding for states that legalize alcohol below 21 years old.

There is no technical force to states having a +21 y/o drinking age. AFAIK they "simply" lose a good chunk (currently 8%) of federal highway funding if the drinking age is <21, according to "The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984" [0]

[0]https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/23/158

Though, it should be pointed out that the federal government can't act completely arbitrarily if it decides to withhold funding. I don't know what the current state of the law is, but South Dakota v. Dole established a specific set of requirements:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole

I think "21 = ok to drink" is ingrained enough in American culture that it's not going away. Only time will tell, though.

I think that's not the case.

Lots of adults were alive when that age limit was eighteen. A small handful were alive when it was prohibited entirely. US (still, despite recent politics) receives immigrants from around the world who have a very different culture with regard to alcohol consumption.

I certainly didn’t wait til I turned 21. Going to bars was a big part of the social scene at my university, and fake ids were quite common.

Ids are getting much harder to fake with REAL ID requirements, and a lot of jurisdictions are very tough on bars that serve to minors even if they had a fake id.

An easy way to deter fake ids that was pretty common even a decade ago was to have off duty cops checking ids, so that being discovered can result in jail time instead of just getting kicked out.

They even have apps now that can detect most fake ids.

And we take another step forward to the authoritarian police state; throwing people in jail for trying to do things that jailers did freely when they were younger, while boosting employment opportunities for the agents of the state to make their money by renting out the privilege of their authoritarian power.

Just to be clear, I'm not advocating anything I mentioned above. I am very much opposed to the practice of hiring off duty police officers to effectively rent the power of the state.

Fuck the drinking age, christ you people. This is the unraveling of the United States itself.

What? Why? Of all the things to point to as the downfall of the experiment, limiting access to something to a majority group of citizens doesn't seem to have been something important.

If you'd like to go on a crusade about prohibition or even access to drugs/controlled substances in general I might be obliged to saddle up with you, but this isn't the straw that is breaking the camels back IMHO

I could not care less about drugs and drinking access. As States Rights advocates advance, the Federal government looses its ability to maintain a consensus between the states. At some point, "United" will be an oxymoron.

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