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Under South Dakota law, persons 19 years old or older were permitted to purchase beer that contained up to 3.2% alcohol. However, Congress enacted Title 23 U.S.C. 158 in 1984 which directed the Secretary of Transportation to withhold a percentage of otherwise allocable federal highway funds from States in which the legal age to purchase or have public possession of any alcoholic beverage is less than twenty-one years of age. In response, South Dakota sued in Federal District Court for a declaratory judgment that Section 158 violated the Twenty-first Amendment and the constitutional limitations on congressional exercise of the spending power provided in the Constitution. The Federal Court rejected the State’s claims, and the Court of Appeals affirmed the claims. As a result of this, the legal question presented was does Section 158 violate the Twenty-first Amendment and the spending clause? Although Congress, in view of the Twenty-first Amendment, may lack the power to impose directly a national minimum drinking age, the Court held that Section 158’s indirect encouragement of state action to obtain uniformity in the States’ drinking ages is a valid use of the spending power. Due to the power of Congress provided by the Co