Inside MAGA’s 'stark departure' from traditional GOP focus on states’ rights

For generations, conservatives and libertarians attacked liberals and progressives for failing to respect states' rights, arguing that it was grossly unfair to make Alabama and Mississippi residents live by Massachusetts standards. The states' rights argument was often used by Republicans to criticize the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973; abortion laws, opponents of the decision argued, needed to be determined on a state-by-state basis instead of having a national standard.

In an article published on February 5, journalist Ross Rosenfeld cites a range of ways in which the second Trump Administration, he says, is showing a total disdain for states' rights.

"Beyond the immediate concern that Trump intends to interfere in upcoming national elections," Rosenfeld explains, "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'…. 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.'"

Rosenfeld continues, "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."

Trump, Rosenfeld argues, showed no regard for states' rights when he called for elections to be taken over by the federal government instead of run by individual states — a proposal that, the journalist notes, would be blatantly unconstitutional. And Trump "attacked the rights of cities and states to enact 'sanctuary city' policies," Rosenfeld observes.

"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,'" Rosenfeld explains. "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'…. 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…. Trump, then, only cares about states' rights when it serves his political or policy purposes."

Rosenfeld adds, "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."

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