Garcia

Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, (1985),^[1] is a United States Supreme Court decision in which the Court held that the Congress has the power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to extend the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that employers provide minimum wage and overtime pay to their employees, to state and local governments. In this case, the Court overruled its previous decision in National League of Cities v. Usery,^[2] in which the Court had held that regulation of the activities of state and local governments "in areas of traditional governmental functions" would violate the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Garcia represents in many ways the high-water mark for the Court's expansive reading of the Commerce Clause to favour centralized national government as opposed to the more decentralized version of federalism, in which the Tenth Amendment limits the authority of the federal government vis à vis the states, as envisioned by Justices Rehnquist and O'Connor. While Chief Justice Rehnquist's later opinion in United States v. Lopez did not purport to overturn Garcia, it reasserted the Court's power to set limits on Congress' authority to invoke the Commerce Clause to regulate in areas that have only an insignificant connection with interstate commerce.