The Left’s new emphasis on state authority reflects not appreciation for federalism but partisan maneuvering until Democrats regain control of Washington.
The Left's new emphasis on state authority reflects not appreciation for federalism but partisan maneuvering until Democrats regain control of Washington.
D onald Trump’s return to the presidency is not only sparking alarm among Democrats — it’s prompting some Democratic governors to rediscover the power of federalism. While continuing to invoke the “threat to democracy” narrative, Illinois governor JB Pritzker and Colorado governor Jared Polis are leading a new effort to bolster state sovereignty. Under the banner of “Governors Safeguarding Democracy,” the initiative aims to “fortify democratic institutions in the states and ensure that the rule of law serves all people.”
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom convened a special session of the legislature to navigate efforts to protect his state’s interests and laws from another Trump presidency. Newsom vowed to “take action” against federal overreach “when rights and freedoms are targeted.”
While much of the policy agenda — outside of core Democratic issues like abortion or climate change — remains unclear, the strategy of deep-blue states uniting against Trump is becoming more apparent.
In a recent essay in The Atlantic, Franklin Foer sheds light on the broader partisan strategy of blue states coalescing in ways that bend the political culture to their will. “The innovation that the new federalists propose is that the blue states begin to leverage their big budgets — and their outsize influence — by acting in concert,” writes Foer.
“Democrats that have unified control of government contribute 43 percent of the national GDP. (Red states fully under Republican rule account for 37 percent.)” And, adds Foer, “Economic power is the basis for political power.”
Foer goes on to state that Democrats can learn from Republican governors like Texas’s Greg Abbott, who deftly exposed the hypocrisy of the Left on illegal immigration through migrant-relocation efforts. While immigration falls under federal jurisdiction, the example works as a blueprint for governors of blue states to likewise sow political discord in red states.
A few examples that Foer highlights are the luring away of ob-gyn doctors from red states and the funneling of blue-state pension funds into conservative states with investments in wind energy with the goal of applying “pressure on Republican governors by provoking a political backlash from within.”
His essay also notes that Democratic policy experts are discovering “the latent power of state government.” However, given Foer’s analysis, this emphasis on state authority seems to reflect not some newfound appreciation for the principles of federalism but partisan maneuvering until Democrats can regain control of Washington.
Unfortunately, these political calculations point to the fact that both parties today are too heavily entrenched in a Wilsonian worldview, one that envisions a powerful presidency with limits placed more on states and localities than on the executive branch. This framework has been the governing norm for over a century, ever since the Woodrow Wilson era, with the short promise of the Harding-Coolidge “return to normalcy” upended by the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Still, while even purely partisan pushback against the excessive powers of the presidency and executive agencies can be valuable, any approach to federalism that seeks merely to wait out a particular president or to find state-driven strategies to impose California values on the entire nation completely misses the point. Using federalism simply as a tactic to engineer public opinion only to concentrate more power in Washington is another symptom of the problem that erodes our ability to govern ourselves and our communities.
In the end, the question for Democrats and Republicans is not just how to survive in a post-Trump America, but how to thrive in a system where power is increasingly decentralized for the benefit of the people. It’s clear that both parties — and, more importantly, Americans — benefit most from governors working in a principled manner to limit Washington’s influence in their states beyond just Trump. If they truly embrace federalism over convenient political calculations, they will find that their best hope for the future lies in coalescing power not in one man or woman, but in the states and people themselves — just as the American Founders envisioned.