When state and local officials threaten to place armed forces in the way of federal authority, something dangerous is afoot.
Did Tim Walz call for a state insurrection against the federal government? Not quite. But he’s getting uncomfortably close to the line. Walz said in a press conference Wednesday that he was putting the Minnesota National Guard on a state of readiness to be called up, a step he followed through with an executive order on Thursday. In and of itself, that’s a reasonable precaution in the event of riots: Recall that Walz was very slow to deploy the Guard against the George Floyd riots in 2020. What’s more ominous is Walz’s rhetoric about what he’s doing.
On Wednesday, emphasizing that “these National Guard troops are our National Guard troops,” Walz said that he was looking at calling them up for “protection of the people of Minnesota, and you can be assured, whether it’s the State Patrol or whether it’s the National Guard, their deployment is there to protect, and so for whatever it is, if it’s an active nature, if it’s a global pandemic, or, in this case, if it is a rogue federal agent . . .” Given Walz’s anti-ICE rhetoric and emphasis on these being the state’s own forces — not federal forces — it seemed as if he was implying that he might deploy them against ICE. Thursday, insisting that “we believe in states rights,” Walz deepened those suspicions. He warned that “this tragedy will be magnified a hundredfold if this fight goes into the hallways of our public schools,” and drew a bracing parallel: “Someone asked about that, and they mentioned Ruby Bridges, the Little Rock folks, about escorting people in. We have not determined that yet. It is situation that we’re we’re going to have to explore.”
Why is it so disturbing to bring up Little Rock or Ruby Bridges? Because in Little Rock in 1957, the U.S. military (the 101st Airborne) was deployed not just to ensure that black teenagers could enter a desegregated school free from threats by private citizens, but also to protect them against the Arkansas National Guard, which was mobilized by segregationist governor Orval Faubus to prevent Little Rock Central High School from being integrated. In 1960 in Louisiana, U.S. Marshals did the same for six-year-old Ruby Bridges, albeit without the same level of escalation by the state. In our federal system, when push comes to shove, that’s the duty of federal authorities. But Walz is implying that he would play the Orval Faubus role this time, defying federal authority. Who is Ruby Bridges in such a parallel? Obviously, schoolchildren, teachers, parents, or school employees who are potentially deportable by ICE under federal statutory law. The only possible explanation for “exploring” a Little Rock or Ruby Bridges scenario is that Walz is contemplating the use of the Minnesota National Guard to prevent federal agents from enforcing federal law.
Walz veered back and forth between begging Minnesotans not to give Donald Trump an excuse to deploy federal troops, to encouraging more civil disobedience (“I had the privilege of serving with John Lewis, and John talked about good trouble. I’m not telling you not to find good trouble”), to comparing Minnesota’s role today with how its troops performed at Gettysburg. This was an irresponsible and incoherent performance, and perhaps only its incoherence makes it likelier that he was fantasizing out loud rather than actively plotting an armed state rebellion against federal authority. But he’s playing with fire in that direction, and if he doesn’t stop, he will gift-wrap for Donald Trump a legal basis to invoke the Insurrection Act and follow Dwight Eisenhower’s path in 1957 of deploying the Army to protect federal law enforcement.
Worse, Walz isn’t alone. The Philadelphia authorities held a press conference on Thursday, with the district attorney threatening arrests of ICE agents. Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal called ICE “Trump’s army to attack citizens of the United States” and threatened violence: “You don’t want this smoke, because we will bring it to you.”
Then there’s Zohran Mamdani, who has said repeatedly that he would use the New York City Police Department to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arguing in November, “I believe that this is a city of international law.” Again, this would bring the NYPD potentially into armed conflict not only with Israeli and U.N. security, but also with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects visiting foreign heads of state. Mamdani sounds most of all like his predecessor Fernando Wood, who argued in 1861 that the city should consider seceding at the same time as the Confederacy:
Why should not New York city, instead of supporting by her contributions in revenue two-thirds of the expenses of the United States, become also equally independent? As a free city, with but nominal duty on imports, her local Government could be supported without taxation upon her people. . . . When Disunion has become a fixed and certain fact, why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master — to a people and a party that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her and a party that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her commerce, taken away the power of self-government, and destroyed the Confederacy of which she was the proud Empire City? Amid the gloom which the present and prospective condition of things must cast over the country, New York, as a Free City, may shed the only light and hope of a future reconstruction of our once blessed Confederacy.
The particular irony of progressive Democrats invoking states’ rights to nullify federal law on immigration is that they were so insistent during the Obama and Biden administrations on how the absolute supremacy of federal law precluded states or cities from doing anything on their own to protect the border or vindicate federal immigration law. That resulted in the hard line taken against Arizona’s S.B. 1070 that was sustained by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States (2012). And we saw the Biden Administration deploy the Border Patrol to cut wire that had been erected by Texas to obstruct illegal border-crossing. There’s no consistent view of the law or our federal system here. Nor would any of these people be cheering if a red-state governor used state resources to protect “sovereign citizens” from the IRS, or if Kentucky had backed Kim Davis to the hilt in refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses that were barred by Kentucky’s constitution.
But when state and local officials who command the deadly force of the state National Guard or big-city police departments start threatening to place those forces in the way of federal authority, there is something more dangerous afoot than just legal debates about federalism.