Republican Governor Slams Texas National Guard Deployment to Chicago

“I am calling on you, as Chair of the National Governors Association, to speak out against the unconstitutional deployment of Texas National Guard units into Illinois without my consent or authorization,” wrote Pritzker earlier this week. “This is precisely the federal and interstate overreach we warned against—gubernatorial authority being trampled, state sovereignty being ignored, and the constitutional balance between states being attacked.”

“I was surprised that Governor Abbott sent troops from Texas to Illinois,” Governor Stitt said today to the NYT. “Abbott and I sued the Biden administration when the shoe was on the other foot and the Biden administration was trying to force us to vaccinate all of our soldiers and force masks across the country.”

That Governor Stitt responded so quickly to Pritzker’s threat demonstrates the federalist principles at the base of this association. It also demonstrates how this fundamentally bipartisan organization established in 1907 was crumbling under the weight of Republican hyper-partisanship that established a King who is overruling all states’ sovereignty. Democratic governors Laura Kelly of Kansas and Tim Walz of Minnesota also threatened to pull out of the NGA earlier this year over Republican states being totally cool with abandoning states’ rights principles when a Republican violates them, and it had clearly reached an untenable point where the NGA would lose all legitimacy among blue states. Having two governors whose states account for nearly a fifth of U.S. GDP escalate the threat surely got the attention of all the red state governors.

And as much as Republicans are feeling their oats right now, I don’t think red states want to travel down the path of disconnecting themselves from blue states to any degree given how dependent they are on blue states to pay their own bills. As Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (who has advised five presidents) and Stephen Henriques (who is a senior fellow at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership institute) wrote earlier this year, “From 2018 to 2022, individuals and organizations from blue states contributed nearly 60 percent of all federal tax receipts but only received 53 percent of all federal contributions to states in the form of either direct payments, grants, contracts, or wages. Meanwhile, red states were only responsible for 40 percent of federal tax receipts but received 47 percent of all federal contributions to states.”

To put it in language the GOP can understand: blue states are generally the makers and red states are generally the takers. If red states are going to aid Trump’s invasion of blue states while cheering on Trump pulling funding from blue states, at what point do blue states have any incentive to stay in a union increasingly designed around their exploitation? What happens if Pritzker and Newsom establish a new NGA around the states that actually create most of America’s economic growth, and funnel their tax receipts through that entity and slowly shut the red states out of their bounty?

I don’t think red states want to travel much further down this path of pitting “one governor against another governor” as Stitt described it, because blue states can make them feel a lot of pain too and no one would come out ahead in a more formal breakup of the United States that seems all too possible these days. The good news is that Stitt may not be the only one opposed to Trump’s invasion of Illinois given that when the Times asked whether other GOP governors would also speak out against Texas’ deployment of the National Guard, he said he thought would and that “Maybe you just haven’t asked the right ones.”