"Supreme Court says Rastafarian can’t sue prison officials over shorn dreadlocks."

WaPo reports. 

This is a complicated case, written by Justice Gorsuch, for a 6-person majority, in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety. It's about limits on Congress's power to impose conditions as it exercises its Spending Power. The statute is the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, and I assume most of us feel empathy for a Rastafarian prisoner who experiences a routine prison haircutting. The federal statute is designed to relieve prisoners of substantial burdens on their religion (unless the strict scrutiny standard is met). The problem is the scope of Congress's power.

Let's look at the Gorsuch opinion:

Today, Congress offers financial support to all 50 States and many other entities. Much of that support comes with strings attached. So, for example, Congress has conditioned receipt of federal highway funds on a State’s agreement to maintain laws setting a minimum drinking age of 21. See South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U. S. 203 (1987). Likewise, Congress has conditioned federal Medicaid funds on a State’s willingness to administer its healthcare programs consistent with various rules. See Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, 606 U. S. 357, 362–364 (2025). 

In each of these contexts and many others, the penalty for noncompliance is straightforward: Congress may “terminate funds” if a recipient fails to abide by the conditions associated with its grants. The statute at issue before us, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), works similarly. As relevant here, RLUIPA imposes various conditions on federal funds distributed to state prison systems like the Louisiana Department of Corrections (LDOC). One condition requires prison systems to refrain from imposing “substantial burden[s] on the religious exercise[s]” of state prisoners outside exceptional circumstances. See 42 U. S. C. §§2000cc–1(a), (b)(1). If a prison system fails to comply with that condition, Congress may cut off its funding.

But when enacting RLUIPA, Congress did something more: It included another, distinct remedy as part of the bargain. As a condition of funding, Congress called on state prison systems to agree to answer suits by private plaintiffs alleging substantial burdens on their religious exercises. Specifically, the law asked those systems to consent to suit by any injured party “assert[ing] a violation of” RLUIPA and seeking “appropriate relief.” §2000cc–2(a).

This case concerns that provision. Damon Landor is a Rastafarian whose religious convictions require him to leave his hair uncut. In 2020, after a conviction in Louisiana state court, Mr. Landor spent a few months in custody. Near the end of his sentence, as officers transferred him from one facility to another, Mr. Landor grew concerned that the new facility’s intake officers might cut his hair pursuant to standard LDOC grooming policies. To avoid that possibility, he provided the officers with a copy of Ware v. LDOC, 866 F. 3d 263 (CA5 2017), which held that RLUIPA generally bars prisons from cutting Rastafarians’ hair. But, Mr. Landor says, the LDOC officers in the new facility responded by throwing his copy of Ware in the trash and proceeding to shave his head, causing him to violate his religious beliefs. 

After that transpired, Mr. Landor brought this lawsuit under RLUIPA seeking money damages. He sued not only LDOC, but also some of the prison system’s individual officers in their personal capacities. The officers responded by asking the district court to dismiss Mr. Landor’s complaint. As they saw it, their employer, LDOC, may have struck a bargain with the federal government to answer certain private suits by prisoners like Mr. Landor. But, they argued, they were not parties to that or any other agreement to answer private suits under RLUIPA. Accordingly, they continued, Mr. Landor had no federal cause of action against them....

As the parties agree, Congress enacted them pursuant to what is sometimes called the Constitution’s Spending Clause. That provision of Article I gives Congress the “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” At the founding, some argued this language conferred on Congress the power to regulate on nearly any topic it wishes, backed by practically any sanction it chooses, so long as it does so in service of the “general Welfare.” It appears that Gouverneur Morris, a leading advocate of this reading and a member of the Committee on Style, even tried to replace one of the draft Clause’s commas with a semicolon with the hope of making his reading more plausible. But a careful proofreader—Roger Sherman—noticed the surreptitious edit, and the Convention rejected it. 

In the end, the founding generation rejected Morris’s reading of the Clause just as it had his semicolon. While the Clause may allow Congress to raise and spend money in support of the “general Welfare,” early authorities concluded, it did not “endow Congress with [any] power to regulate conduct.” Were it otherwise, they recognized, “the ‘enumeration of specific powers’ elsewhere in Article I would be rendered largely pointless, and the Nation would trade a limited federal government for ‘an unlimited’ one.” This Court’s precedents have long respected that founding-era consensus. 

It is an understanding that gives rise to important limitations on spending legislation. Often, Congress attaches conditions to the funds it distributes. And typically, if a recipient “violates those conditions,” Congress may “terminate” its agreement to provide funds. But because the Spending Clause confers no authority to “regulate directly,” Congress cannot just dictate whatever other sanctions it might wish for violating conditions found in its Spending Clause legislation. 

Instead, additional sanctions are permissible only with the “voluntar[y] and knowin[g]” consent of those who must bear them. 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. 

Under the Spending Clause, Congress’s power to spend money does not include the power to regulate. Spending Clause statutes can bind only those who voluntarily and knowingly undertake obligations by agreement with the federal government. Because that essential element is missing here, we affirm the judgment of the Fifth Circuit.