States Rights

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Thursday upheld the right of the federal government to impose a 55-m.p.h. speed limit on highways by threatening to withhold highway construction money from states. In a unanimous opinion on the first challenge to the national speed limit, the court spurned claims by the state of Nevada that the federal government was using unfair coercion to get states to comply with the law.

In a victory for individual privacy over states' rights, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law Wednesday that bars states from selling or revealing personal information obtained from driver's licenses. In a 9-0 ruling, the court said the law did not burden the states and was well within Congress' power. California, in fact, already protects the information. But after the recent string of states' rights rulings, it is somewhat surprising now when the high court upholds an act of Congress.

The Republican-controlled Congress, in a departure from the traditional GOP support for states' rights and limited federal rule, has been moving on a number of fronts to curtail state and local powers over matters important to business groups and advocates of tighter national security. The recent moves by Congress have begun to provoke objections even in states that are socially conservative and have pro-business governments.

A sharply divided Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down a 1990 federal law that outlaws possession of a gun within 1,000 feet of a school. In a ruling with broad implications for constitutional law and with potentially far-reaching impact on domestic social policy, the high court ruled that the Gun-Free School Zones Act is an unconstitutional infringement on states' rights to regulate purely local activity. The 5-4 majority, led by Chief Justice William H.

The Supreme Court on Monday narrowly held that states were subject to the provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act, ruling that they could be sued for excluding disabled people from courthouses or voting booths or denying them crucial public services. The 5-4 decision -- which rejected a claim of states' rights -- turned on the Constitution's demand that states not deny people "the equal protection of the laws." It came on the 50th anniversary of the court's decision in Brown vs.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday stripped the nation's 5 million state workers--as well as California's teachers and public school employees--of federal protection against age discrimination. On a 5-4 vote, the court ruled that state agencies, including public colleges, are shielded from lawsuits filed by their workers under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

No recent president has been quicker than George W. Bush to embrace the virtues of state and local control. But when it comes to the environment, William Becker discovered, that commitment can evaporate when state regulation would be tougher on industry than federal rules. Becker, who represents administrators of state air-pollution programs in Washington, met with White House officials last month to appeal to them not to weaken the Clean Air Act.

Re "Top Court Says No to Medical Marijuana Use," May 15: Within the past five years, four of my friends and relatives have been stricken with breast cancer. Two of them died. All suffered through painful courses of chemotherapy. In some cases, marijuana was the only medicine that helped them to keep food down--at all--for weeks on end. What would the government tell those women who suffered and died? That they were being protected from a life of addiction? Preposterous! Cancer is striking a huge number of American citizens, and for our government to turn a cold shoulder on them is incredibly cruel.

Few Americans wake up in the morning worried about threats to their state's "sovereignty" or the fate of "federalism," the balance of power between national and state authorities. Yet five justices of the Supreme Court have made these issues their cause, and this week's final round of rulings for the term showed them determined to return American law to an earlier era.

A high-pressure federal effort to toughen drunk driving laws across the nation is meeting resistance in a third of the states, where many politicians say the policy is counterproductive and misguided. Highway safety regulators in 1998 called on states to lower the allowable blood-alcohol level for drivers to 0.08%, or risk losing millions of dollars in federal highway grants.