Opinion of the Court
opinion)), that Talevski cannot invoke §1983 to vindicate the rights the FNHRA provisions at issue here purport to recognize because Congress seems to have enacted the FNHRA pursuant to the spending power recognized in Article I, §8, of the Constitution.[1]
HHC’s argument generally proceeds as follows. Starting with our precedent regarding Congress’s spending power, HHC begins by emphasizing our observation that federal legislation premised on that power is “much in the nature of a contract,” because, “in return for federal funds, the States agree to comply with federally imposed conditions.” Pennhurst State School and Hospital v. Halderman, 451 U. S. 1, 17 (1981); see also Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, 596 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (slip op., at 4). HHC then seizes on the “contract” analogy to create a syllogism. It reasons that (1) any private party suing to enforce an obligation between Federal and State Governments that a Spending Clause statute creates is, essentially, a “third-party beneficiary” (by which HHC means beneficiaries of rights created in any such statute); and (2) under common-law contract principles extant at the time that Congress enacted §1983, third-party beneficiaries were “generally” barred from suing to enforce contract obligations; therefore, (3) plaintiffs like Talevski, as a purported third-party beneficiary of the FNHRA, may not use §1983 to do something that third-party beneficiaries of contracts generally could not do in the 1870s. Brief for Petitioners 13, 17–18 (citing 1870s treatises and state cases).
The upshot, for HHC, is that “Spending Clause statutes do not give rise to privately enforceable rights under Section 1983” because contracts were not “generally” enforceable by third-party beneficiaries at common law. Id., at 11,
- ↑ See Art. I, §8, cl. 1 (authorizing the Legislature to “lay and collect Taxes … to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”).
