As you may know, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) is now threatening to invoke the Tenth Amendment in order to keep his home state of Minnesota out of any health care reform package that gets passed, and raising the possibility of governors filing lawsuits against it. As it turns out, this is not the first time that a Minnesota governor has been embroiled in a battle of states’ rights with the federal government — and the last time it happened, it involved political action from the left.
The last time, in the 1980’s, Democratic Gov. Rudy Perpich unsuccessfully went to the Supreme Court, leading a group of governors who argued that the federal government had no authority to send the state National Guards for what were officially billed as training missions in Honduras, in which they would be building roads, over the governors’ objections. The governors and other opponents had argued that this was a pretext for aiding the Contras in neighboring Nicaragua, according to an April 12, 1987, article in the Chicago Tribune (via Nexis).
The confrontation began when three governors, George Deukmejian (R-CA), Richard Celeste (D-OH), and Joseph Brennan (D-ME) refused direct federal requests for their state Guards to be called up. Congress then passed the Montgomery Amendment, named for Rep. Sonny Montgomery (D-MS), stripping Governors of the legal power to refuse an overseas Guard deployment.
“A few governors just cannot say, ‘I will not let my guardsmen go to train in a certain part of the world because I do not like the politics of that situation,'” Montgomery argued at the time, according to a November 4, 1986 article in the Christian Science Monitor.
Perpich then took the lead, filing a lawsuit against the constitutionality of the Montgomery Amendment. After he was initially rebuffed by a federal district court judge, he vowed to appeal. “We feel very strongly about the states’ rights issue, and that is why we will be appealing … ,” Perpich was quoted in an August 4, 1987, Associated Press article. “This is a clear example of the federal government’s encroaching on state powers that have worked effectively in the past.”
Yes — the nation was subjected to the spectacle of a liberal Minnesota Democrat arguing for states’ rights, against a measure from a conservative Mississippi Democrat.
Perpich went all the way to the Supreme Court, joined by six other governors, including Celeste and Michael Dukakis. In the end, the Supreme ruled unanimously for the federal government in Perpich v. Department of Defense.
