Five months into Donald Trump's second term, it already feels like five years. The administration's shock and awe strategy has left the country dizzy. There's the daft tariff scheme that has caused Americans to be worried about an economic crash. We've watched as the civil service, legal system, academia, corporations and even churches have been forced to deal with an unprecedented assault by an administration hellbent on dominating nearly every independent institution in our society. Now, with Trump's mass deportation push into Los Angeles and his decision to federalize the California National Guard, the Constitution itself is being assailed with direct threats to state and local sovereignty.
For as long as most of us can remember, "states' rights" was the bedrock of American conservative ideology. For generations, Southern states used the concept to justify slavery, the Civil War and generations of Jim Crow. And while liberals didn't approve of states' rights arguments being used to deny universal human rights (and believed those arguments were not made in good faith), they did not deny the concept of state sovereignty itself under the Constitution. Short of amending the document, or tearing it up altogether, they recognized it was pointless to pretend that federalism didn't exist or to only recognize the idea when it was politically useful.
