First, They Came for Your Elections. Then, Your Guns.
“I want to see elections
be honest, and if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me
should do something about it,” President Trump said
on Tuesday. He then cited Detroit, Philadelphia, adding, “The federal
government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to
count the vote. If they can’t count the vote legally and honestly, then
somebody else should take over.” His comments came a day after he told
podcaster Dan Bongino, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We
should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The
Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Trump’s remarks are
fundamentally at odds with the Constitution.
The elections clause grants states the right to decide the “times, places and
manner of holding elections for senators and representatives,” and assigns
oversight exclusively to Congress; and the Tenth Amendment enshrines the
principle of federalism—that “powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States
respectively, or to the people.” But Trump has never shown much fealty to, let
alone understanding of, the Constitution.
Some might therefore
dismiss Trump’s rhetoric as an idle threat or perhaps the rantings of an aging
madman. But we cannot dismiss it. The threat is real, as evidenced by Monday’s
news that Trump personally oversaw an FBI raid of an election center in Fulton
County, Georgia, where agents seized
“truckloads” of ballots, along with voter rolls and scanned images. Trump’s DOJ
has also demanded
voter roll information from 44 states and the District of Columbia, including
driver’s license and Social Security data, and has initiated lawsuits against
24 districts when they refused to comply.
Beyond the immediate
concern that Trump intends to interfere in upcoming national elections, his
comments and actions are a stark departure from previous Republican positions
on states’ rights. Just a decade ago, when Trump first sought the presidency, the
Republican Party platform
included complaints against the Obama administration for “bullying of state and
local governments.” It declared allegiance to the notion of states’ rights by
asserting that “every violation of state sovereignty by federal officials is
not merely a transgression of one unit of government against another; it is an
assault on the liberties of individual Americans.” And Trump himself stated
in 2016 that “many, many things actually should be states’ rights.” He said he
was willing to leave issues involving transgender Americans and abortion
to the states, and promised
to “make states the laboratories of democracy once again.”
Yet the notion of states’
rights has gone the way of the wind as Trump has remade the GOP in his
authoritarian image and sought to massively expand his executive power. Now
he’s deemed states’ rights rather inconvenient to his maximalist goals. Thus, the
administration has attacked
the rights of cities and states to enact “sanctuary city” policies that limit
cooperation with federal authorities enforcing Trump’s draconian immigration
policies. Trump has issued executive
orders targeting states’ own climate laws, despite the fact that, as
attorney David
Doniger of the National Resources Defense Council puts it, “the U.S.
Supreme Court has upheld state authority to enact and enforce such laws from
the early 19th century to the present day.”
After the murder of nurse
Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by a Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border
Protection officer, the president told
reporters, “You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns.” And on Monday,
Trump’s sycophantic U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, stated
to Fox News that anyone who brings a firearm into the city can expect to go to
jail. “I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care
if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.”
Trump and his MAGA
underlings have decided, in other words, that the Second Amendment—long an
inviolable part of Republican orthodoxy—does not apply to anti-ICE protesters.
This has dismayed
not only guns rights groups but even some Republican lawmakers. “Why is a
‘conservative’ judge threatening to arrest gun owners?” Representative Thomas
Massie of Kentucky asked
on X. Representative Greg Steube of Florida tweeted at
Pirro, “I bring a gun into the district every week…. I have a license in
Florida and DC to carry. And I will continue to carry to protect myself and
others.” Of course, they were in the minority: Most Republicans have remained
silent, tacitly acknowledging that they don’t have absolutist positions on gun
rights and states’ rights after all.
Some might counter that
Democrats at times have also violated or wrongfully disregarded states’ rights.
This was the contention of the Supreme
Court in 2022 when it struck down an Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency regulation that a
majority of the justices said went too far in imposing federal carbon emissions
standards on states without congressional approval. The Biden administration
was also accused
of violating states’ rights to craft their own policies around Covid treatment
and prevention. In both cases, however, the federal government was motivated by
the desire to protect the health and welfare of the people, and can be said to
have been acting in the public’s best interests. These were areas of legitimate
legal dispute, not pure power grabs as we’re seeing from the Trump
administration.
Moreover, these were
national policies that applied to all states equally—not directed at specific
states for political reasons. The same cannot be said of the Trump
administration. It has questioned
billions of dollars of federal funding going to 14 blue states and the District
of Columbia, and has frozen funding for childcare in five Democratic-led
states. Trump’s retributive intentions are hardly subtle: Unlawfully yanking
away $7 billion of funding for clean energy products, his officials practically
boasted of their motivations to a federal judge, who noted
that they “freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily—if
not exclusively—based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens
voted for President Trump in 2024.”
None of these actions
show a particular regard for states’ rights to make decisions for their own
people. Yet asserting that Trump has changed his position on federalism would
imply that he had a position on the issue in the first place. Trump, as we know,
reverses his position on issues—constitutional and otherwise—whenever it suits
him. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, he declared that he had “absolute
power” to determine and enforce policies. But two days later, after
pushback from Republican governors, he decided that he was a states’ rights guy
after all, telling the governors, “You are all very capable people, I think in
all cases, very capable people. And you’re going to be calling your shots.”
And in his policymaking,
Trump has staked out obviously contradictory positions on federalism. He has
simultaneously argued that the federal government has no
right to tell states to limit coal production and carbon pollution, yet
somehow he does
have the authority to tell blue states that they cannot set their own
emission standards.
Trump, then, only cares
about states’ rights when it serves his political or policy purposes. But by
and large, during his second term, Trump has shown little regard for states’
rights and sovereignty. There’s no clearer example of this than his militarization
of American cities.
There is no more telling
signal of governmental overreach than heavily armed, unidentifiable goon squads
roaming American streets and terrorizing towns. Even now, after the killings of
Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Trump has refused to back down and allow states to
police their own streets, stating that there will be no pullback in
Minnesota. It’s the rare issue where he’s been consistent: He didn’t care about
states’ rights, either, when he sent troops into Los
Angeles, violating the Posse Comitatus Act, or when he federalized
D.C.’s police force.
Meanwhile, Republicans,
once the party of states’ rights, have barely made a peep about Trump’s
destruction of a once-sanctified GOP principle. Their timid acceptance proves
what liberals have long argued to be true: States’ rights was always just a
sham excuse for the party to ignore national laws, including those enshrined in
or protected by the Constitution, that it disagreed with. Now, states’ rights
are largely a hindrance to MAGA’s plans—in particular the weaponization of the
federal government against Trump’s perceived enemies, whether it be immigrants,
protesters, or entire states that voted against him. And so the principle of
federalism becomes just more collateral damage by the fascist regime.
