Source: 521 U.S. 898 (1997), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/95-1478.ZO.html.

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Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court:

The question presented in these cases is whether certain interim provisions of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act commanding state and local law enforcement officers to conduct background checks on prospective handgun purchasers and to perform certain related tasks, violate the Constitution….

The petitioners¹ here object to being pressed into federal service, and contend that congressional action compelling state officers to execute federal laws is unconstitutional. Because there is no constitutional text speaking to this precise question, the answer to the CLEOs’ [chief law enforcement officers’] challenge must be sought in historical understanding and practice, in the structure of the Constitution, and in the jurisprudence of this Court….

It is incontestable that the Constitution established a system of “dual sovereignty.” Gregory v. Ashcroft (1991).² Although the states surrendered many of their powers to the new federal government, they retained “a residuary and inviolable sovereignty.”³ This is reflected throughout the Constitution’s text, including (to mention only a few examples) the prohibition on any involuntary reduction or combination of a state’s territory, Art. IV, § 3; the Judicial Power clause, Art. III, § 2, and the Privileges and Immunities clause, Art. IV, § 2, which speak of the “Citizens” of the states; the amendment provision, Article V, which requires the votes of three fourths of the states to amend the Constitution; and the Guarantee clause, Art. IV, § 4, which “presupposes the continued existence of the states and … those means and instrumentalities which are the creation of their sovereign and reserved rights.”⁴ Residual state sovereignty was also implicit, of course, in the Constitution’s conferral upon Congress of not all governmental powers, but only discrete, enumerated ones, Art. I, § 8, which implication was rendered express by the Tenth Amendment’s assertion that “[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

The Framers’ experience under the Articles of Confederation had persuaded them that using the states as the instruments of federal governance was both ineffectual and provocative of federal state conflict.⁵ Preservation of the states as independent political entities being the price of union, and “[t]he practicality of making laws, with coercive sanctions, for the states as political bodies” having been, in Madison’s words, “exploded on all hands,”⁶ the Framers rejected the concept of a central government that would act upon and through the states, and instead designed a system in which the state and federal governments would exercise concurrent authority over the people—who were, in Hamilton’s words, “the only proper objects of government.”⁷ We have set forth the historical record in more detail elsewhere, see New York v. United States, and need not repeat it here. It suffices to repeat the conclusion: “The Framers explicitly chose a Constitution that confers upon Congress the power to regulate individuals, not states.” The great innovation of this design was that “our citizens would have two political capacities, one state and one federal, each protected from incursion by the other”—”a legal system unprecedented in form and design, establishing two orders of government, each with its own direct relationship, its own privity, its own set of mutual rights and obligations to the people who sustain it and are governed by it.”⁸ The Constitution thus contemplates that a state’s government will represent and remain accountable to its own citizens. As Madison expressed it: “[T]he local or municipal authorities form distinct and independent portions of the supremacy, no more subject, within their respective spheres, to the general authority than the general authority is subject to them, within its own sphere.”_⁹

This separation of the two spheres is one of the Constitution’s structural protections of liberty. “Just as the separation and independence of the coordinate branches of the federal government serve to prevent the accumulation of excessive power in any one branch, a healthy balance of power between the states and the federal government will reduce the risk of tyranny and abuse from either front.”¹⁰ To quote Madison once again:

In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.¹¹

The power of the federal government would be augmented immeasurably if it were able to impress into its service—and at no cost to itself—the police officers of the 50 states….

We held in New York that Congress cannot compel the states to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program. Today we hold that Congress cannot circumvent that prohibition by conscripting the state’s officers directly. The federal government may neither issue directives requiring the states to address particular problems, nor command the states’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program. It matters not whether policymaking is involved, and no case by case weighing of the burdens or benefits is necessary; such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty….