Twenty-First Amendment, Section 2:

The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

The Supreme Court has also upheld a federal law related to the sale of alcoholic beverages in at least one case that did not specifically implicate federal preemption. In 1987, the Court upheld the National Minimum Drinking Age Act as a valid exercise of Congress’s spending powers.1 The Act conditioned each state’s receipt of a small percentage of otherwise payable federal highway grant funds on the state’s adoption of a minimum drinking age of twenty-one.2 The Court held that the Act did not infringe on the states’ core Twenty-First Amendment powers to regulate alcoholic beverages because Congress was acting only “indirectly under its spending power to encourage uniformity in the States’ drinking ages.” 3 The Court held that the threat of withholding five percent of highway funding from states that refused to adopt a minimum drinking age of twenty-one was not coercive but only “relatively mild encouragement” to accept Congress’s policy condition.4

Footnotes

1

See South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203, 211–12 (1987).

2

See id.

3

Id. at 206. The Court declined to decide whether the Twenty-First Amendment barred Congress from legislating a national minimum drinking age directly. Id. See also Proposed Legislation to Restrict the Sales of Alcoholic Beverages in Interstate Commerce, 8 Op. O.L.C. 53, 57 (1984) (opining that Congress’s Commerce Clause power would authorize enactment of a federal law prohibiting the sale in interstate commerce of alcoholic beverages to persons under twenty-one years of age, and that such a law would not violate the Twenty-First Amendment). For more on the Court’s Spending Clause jurisprudence, see .

4

Dole, 483 U.S. at 211–12. As Chief Justice John Roberts would later explain, this sum was “less than half of one percent of South Dakota’s budget at the time.” Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519, 581 (2012) (plurality opinion of Roberts, C.J., joined by Breyer and Kagan, JJ.).