As members of Congress scanned the skies for signs of bipartisan intervention amid an imminent government shutdown, the governor of Illinois called for President Trump to be removed from office. Though invoking the 25th Amendment was a rhetorical flourish—no executive-branch Republican would ever entertain the idea—JB Pritzker wasn’t finished.
Last Friday, at a fundraiser for Georgia Democrats in Atlanta shortly after the president’s speech to top military commanders, the governor warned that Trump’s “treasonous words are leading to treasonous actions” and went even further: “The greatest fear of our founding fathers was not immigrants or taxes or men having a beard while serving in the military. The greatest fear of our founding fathers was Donald Trump.”
“My message of alarm,” Pritzker added, “is that the constitutional crisis is not on its way. It is here, and we all better start acting like it.”
What Pritzker did was spotlight for the country how comfortable the president is with seizing power, and how comfortable Congress is with doing nothing of consequence to extricate the republic from this quagmire.
Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard to Portland in defiance of an initial federal court order, and attempting to do the same with the Texas National Guard (along with the Illinois National Guard) for Chicago, has inserted new levels of destabilization into an already compromised federal government. Last week, the president had suggested using “dangerous cities” as military “training grounds.”
U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, noted in her October 4 order that in the case of the Oregon National Guard, the “Defendants ‘interfere[d] with the constitutional balance of power between the federal and state governments’ by federalizing state National Guardsmen for federal service when no statutory or constitutional authority permitted their federalization.”
After the administration went ahead and deployed troops to Oregon, California, Oregon, and the city of Portland requested a second temporary restraining order, and Immergut responded with a new order on Sunday preventing any “federalized members of National Guard” from deploying to Oregon.
With peaceful protests and no rebellion in sight, Trump’s moves usurp governors’ executive powers—specifically their military options as the heads of National Guard units—for no other reason than to terrorize Democratic cities in blue states. Pritzker, who filed a lawsuit Monday against the Trump administration, followed California’s Gavin Newsom and Oregon’s Tina Kotek, in petitioning the courts for relief from these arbitrary military maneuvers.
Gov. Pritzker spotlighted for the country how comfortable the president is with seizing power, and how comfortable Congress is with doing nothing.
Navigating legal thickets may not provide near-term solutions to this chaos, especially if the president blatantly sidesteps the court’s authority. But these regional power brokers undoubtedly recognize they’re the ones who’ll be left to pick up and reassemble the pieces of a country that’s careened into the breakdown lane.
“This is an entirely new world that we’ve entered,” says Saladin Ambar, a professor of political science at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “Governors are poorly equipped to respond in terms of legislation, [that is] in terms of any kind of constitutional authority. What they do have is a kind of bully pulpit and success in their states.”
In modern times, the closest parallel to the current federal-state power crisis occurred during the civil rights era. After Brown v. Board of Education, most Southern Democratic governors were apoplectic about school desegregation, and George Wallace of Alabama and Orval Faubus of Arkansas were loud and proud about their intention to set up literal roadblocks.
In 1957, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to keep nine students out of Central High School in Little Rock. President Dwight Eisenhower turned the tables and federalized the Guard to protect the students, plus 1,000 Army troops to back them up. Six years later, Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door” at the University of Alabama prompted President John F. Kennedy to federalize the Alabama National Guard so that two Black students could register for class.
But the bottom-up resistance from Southern governors to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision pales in comparison to the Trump administration’s top-down dismantling of wide swaths of the federal government, rescissions of federal funding, and federal troop and law enforcement deployments to arrest undocumented and legal immigrants in defiance of the Constitution and existing federal codes.
Since January, only California’s Gavin Newsom has matched Pritzker as an assertive dissenter willing to step into the leadership vacuum left by members of Congress—on both sides of the aisle—who have failed to coalesce into any sort of principled opposition. (Both men are on Democratic presidential short lists for 2028.)
After jousting with Trump over wildfire relief funding and National Guard deployments, Newsom has scheduled a special election for November on mid-decade redistricting changes, in response to similar moves in Texas. Last week, he warned the University of Southern California and other state universities to not accept Trump’s federal funding quid pro quo, because by doing so they would risk him yanking their state funds.
The sum total of developments since January 20 has Newsom even considering whether to send California’s tax dollars to Washington if those billions are going to deprive citizens of social services and deploy troops to tend to parks or train for urban warfare in Los Angeles or elsewhere. (Newsom may not have much recourse to withhold tax dollars from the federal government, but showing some fight is half the battle.)
A few other Democratic governors have stepped out of the shadows. In a surprising display of bipartisan cooperation, New York’s Kathy Hochul and Republican members of the House delegation managed to get $2 million in federal counterterrorism funding cuts reversed, though New York still faces billions’ worth of cuts in major infrastructure projects. Once Baltimore appeared on the White House threat matrix, Maryland’s Wes Moore floated but then paused a redistricting scheme to eliminate the state’s sole Republican representative, though that’s still looming as a potential threat. In Maine, Janet Mills’s “see you in court” moment in the Oval Office, defending the state’s policies on transgender athletes, helped the state notch a later victory in the university funding wars. But she has gone quiet on the national front as she contemplates a challenge to the state’s top Republican, Sen. Susan Collins.
Trumpian partisanship has even infected the National Governors Association, an organization capable of least surface-level bipartisanship at their annual gatherings. This summer, Democrats Tim Walz of Minnesota and Laura Kelly of Kansas shattered that illusion. Dismayed by the NGA’s disinterest in confronting the White House more forcefully, they resigned from the group.
Walz, the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate, maintains a high profile, but Kelly has run into her own troubles in Topeka for supporting California’s redistricting moves while opposing the work-arounds to her state’s own frameworks as demanded by Trump. She can veto any redistricting scheme in Kansas designed to oust Rep. Sharice Davids (D-KS), but the Kansas legislature has a supermajority.
Overall, most Republican governors are operating as accommodationists. Louisiana’s Jeff Landry has come up with what amounts to a National Guard deployment shopping list, requesting troops to deploy in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport; Tennessee’s Bill Lee has done much the same in Memphis. All are Democratic cities with large Black populations. Meanwhile, Southern and Midwestern governors have collected loyalty points by sending their own National Guard units to Washington.
Still, there are a few GOP holdouts on select issues. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio has split the difference, complying with the White House request to send troops for the District of Columbia. But when Vice President JD Vance and Ohio Rep. Max Miller suggested that he send troops to Cleveland, DeWine had little interest in the idea.
The mid-decade redistricting also tends to shuffle the Republican deck. Though Texas and Missouri quickly drew new district maps that prompted several lawsuits, other Republican states have balked. New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte has resisted Trump’s pressure, leading the president to threaten her with a primary challenge. Indiana and Nebraska have expressed interest in the idea but have yet to act.
Democratic governors have also reached back into the pandemic crisis playbook. Two sets of states have joined forces to counteract the fallout from some of the more egregious directives coming from federal health departments. On the public health care front, Newsom, Kotek, Bob Ferguson of Washington state, and Josh Green of Hawaii, a medical doctor, have established the West Coast Health Alliance. On the East Coast, public-health officials set up the Northeast Public Health Collaborative. Both organizations shorten the distance for governors to reach residents with reliable science about vaccines, as well as contagious diseases and health emergencies.
“I think states are looking to one another, saying, ‘Hey, how can we make this work?’ It’s important,” says Ambar. “Life never fully ceases. From a political standpoint, what often happens is that new institutions, new alliances, are made that help shape life in different ways. You can see this in any kind of imperial fall or democratic decline until such time that there’s the possibility of a restoration.”
