Landor v. Louisiana Dept of Corrections and Public Safety · ¶21

Instead, additional sanctions are permissible only with the “voluntar[y] and knowin[g]” consent of those who must bear them. Pennhurst State School and Hospital v. Halderman, 451 U. S. 1, 17 (1981). Put simply, without independent regulatory authority, Congress must rely on consent. It must ask and others must agree to face liability should they violate a funding condition. Time and time again, from at least 1845 to the present, our precedents have stressed the centrality of consent in this field. Compare Searight v. Stokes, 3 How. 151, 169 (1845) (calling spending legislation a “compact . . . to which the state assented”), with Medina, 606 U. S., at 372 (describing spending statutes as “federal-state agreements”).

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