The legend that goes around about both the national 55 mph speed limit in the 1970s and the national standard of blood alcohol content for drunk driving (reduced to 0.08% in 2000) is that states that did not agree to these limits would lose Federal highway funding for road projects. This, indeed, is what is recounted at Wikipedia and is spouted by every legislator when queried about such lawmaking.
However, an international transportation consultant of my acquaintance, shortly before he died unexpectedly, told me that this was “a cockamamie lie.” He claimed that the legislation could not, in fact, block ALL Federal highway funding, but instead threatened to withhold only a small portion of highway funding, but was pitched to legislators as blocking all funding. In the case of the .08 BAC legislation in 2000 it restricted only eight percent of the funds (at maximum) from ONE Federal Highway Administration matching program. This is substantially different, by an order of ten at least, from the allegations made about this “blackmail” (as he described it).
Were the lawmakers and the public “hoodwinked”? Were they lied to and told they would lose all highway funding if they didn’t comply?
Of course legislation could block all Federal highway funding; why not?
I don’t know whether in fact the terms of the legislation would have blocked all federal highway funding to noncompliant states, or just some. Clearly, it would have blocked enough to induce them all to comply.
Was anybody lied to and told that the legislation would block more funding than in fact it would have done? I have no reason to think so. If you want to acheive a particular outcome, why enact legislation that isn’t sufficient to acheive that outcome and then lie about the legislation in the hope of acheiving the same outcome by deception? Since all the state governments employ armies of lawyers who are experienced in reading, interpreting and applying legislation, the likelihood that nobody will notice that you are lying about the effect of the legislation is pretty small. It would be much simply and more effective just to pass legislation that will achieve your outcome, and not have to lie about it.
It may be that there was a mix of committed and discretionary funding. This is often the case with government funding. A very large amount of the highway funding may simply have been long since committed, but the 8% represents the new funding that is available. This is for all useful intents when talking to state legislators the same as withholding federal funding, as the legislators don’t care about old schemes that continue to be funded. What they care about is their ability to enact new projects. If the federal government refuses to provide matching funding for any new state sponsored project, that will typically kill that project. A local legislator in the US is typically judged at the ballot box on the “what have you done for me lately?” basis. An inability to bring any new highway work to the state is going to focus the minds very quickly.
It’s alo an easy excuse for a local legislator who is being pressured by people who don’t like the blood-alcohol limit – the Feds forced us into doing this. Explaining Federal committed & discretionary funding would just complicate things. Much easier to tell a voter “I wanted to vote against that, but the Feds blackmailed us” even if you know that the Federal threat wasn’t to ALL funding.
The OP’s friend is basically correct that the Federal Government cannot create a law that conditions funding in an overly punitive manner.
In South Dakota v Dole, the Supreme Court found 7-2 that it is reasonable for Congress to limit 5% of highway funding for states not raising the drinking age to 21. The limits to such funding restrictions are found below:
As you can see from the article it has happened several times in the past. It is not claimed that the threat was to stop all funding. For instance the BAC law was to cut funding by 10%. That’s still millions of dollars at least and a significant amount for the states to come up with on their own. They could absolutely hold the entire amount hostage but the chances of getting enough votes for that in congress are thin. The power of congress to maintain this practice was ruled on in South Dakota v Dole.
ETA the last proposal was to reduce the funding by 25% to any state that did not pass a texting and driving law. That did not pass into law.
The actual text of the laws passed by Congress are publicly available, and anyone who wants can read exactly what they say. Now, most people don’t want to read the actual text of laws, but I would hope that state legislators would mostly be among those who do. So you’re not going to be able to lie about what’s in the law.
Not at all. It was a quite well known fact that the withheld funds were only a percentage. But like Loach posted, even a percentage was millions of dollars.
Magazines like car & Driver consistently wrote articles against the double nickel and included multiple ways to replace the money lost by jacking up the highway speeds back to a reasonable limit.
Before adjourning last spring, the Tennessee legislature passed several state laws against drunk driving and underage drinking. One of the measures, however, raised the legal BAC for underage drinkers to .08, the same level as for adults, while significantly increasing the related penalties. The reason for making the BAC the same for all drivers was to simplify enforcement.
However, nobody realized at the time that this violated federal guidelines which mandated a lower BAC for underage drivers. So, if the law went into effect as scheduled, it was going to cost the state of Tennessee something like $60 million a year in funding. So the whole legislature had to get together this week in a special session just to fix the bill they passed last session. But at least it was a week that they weren’t out knocking on doors campaigning for re-election.
If any state is looking at losing ANY funding, they will comply with a quickness!
With that said, if multiple states “team up” against these things, then they can tell the federal government to stick it. And this is what they should do with the latest clean water/sewage mandates from the federal government. We simply CAN’T afford all the silly requirements they are placing on cities! Just say ENOUGH! NO!