How the Administration Turned Federalism Into a Loyalty Test

In April, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sued Washtenaw County, Michigan, over its sanctuary immigration policies and called the county's position "a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law" ^[1]. The word choice was precise. "Insurrection" carries the weight of the Constitution's disqualification clause — the language of rebellion against lawful authority. Applied to a county's decision about which federal requests its officers will honor, the term does more than escalate rhetoric. It announces a doctrine: resistance to federal power is not a disagreement between sovereigns. It is illegitimacy itself. That doctrine now operates across three distinct channels, and in every one the arrow points the same direction. The first and most direct is federal authority overriding states. The Justice Department has sued 48 states and the District of Columbia to compel release of unredacted voter registration databases, invoking the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to override state privacy laws ^[2][3]. It has filed more than 14 lawsuits against sanctuary jurisdictions under the Supremacy Clause, arguing that state laws "obstruct federal law enforcement and thwart the constitutional obligation of the President" ^[4]. It sued Minnesota over race-based hiring mandates. Attorney General Pam Bondi described the suit as part of a broader campaign to "bring Minnesota into compliance with federal law" ^[5]. It sued Virginia over a mask ban on federal agents and a law imposing state conditions on immigration enforcement agreements; DHS openly declared it would not comply with the state's statute ^[6]. It threatened to decertify state fair housing agencies and cut $10.7 million in funding if they enforce protections beyond the 1968 Fair Housing Act, prompting 16 states to sue ^[7]. And the EPA reclassified California's emissions waiver, with the president asserting that the Constitution does not allow one state "special status to create standards that limit consumer choice and impose an electric vehicle mandate upon the entire nation" ^[8]. The second channel inverts the first: the administration empowers local officials to defy their own state governments. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pledged federal legal support to any county that seeks to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

And if there is a county in this country, whether it’s red or blue, that seeks to cooperate with the federal government to remove violent illegal criminal aliens from their communities, this administration is here to help. — Karoline Leavitt

Sheriffs in New York, Maryland, and Colorado have openly flouted state restrictions on ICE cooperation with the administration's backing ^[9]. The federal government picks the level of government that produces the outcome it wants and arms it. The third channel is the one in which the administration actually uses the word "federalism." Seventeen Republican-led states sued California over its plastic packaging law, invoking "principles of federalism" to block a blue state's regulatory authority ^[10]. Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers argued that California "is not entitled to pronounce nationwide policies."

If California goes unchecked, consumers will be forced to pay more for basic necessities. — Mike Hilgers

Here, "federalism" means one state may not impose its standards on others, a principle the administration has no interest in applying when the federal government itself is the one doing the imposing. The Bondi quid pro quo with Minnesota reveals that these channels feed the same machine. In February, Bondi pressured Governor Tim Walz to turn over voter rolls in exchange for ending an ICE operation in Minneapolis ^[11]. The voter-data campaign and the immigration enforcement campaign are connected: unredacted voter rolls feed the SAVE program, which the administration used to run 67 million voter records through DHS databases, flagging roughly 24,000 potential noncitizens and issuing expedited deportation orders for noncitizens found on voter rolls ^[12][13][14]. Texas had already shared 18.4 million voter records — names, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, partial Social Security numbers — with the Justice Department in December 2025 ^[12]. The empirical basis for all of this is thin. A Reuters analysis found only 129 people charged under the 1996 voting-by-aliens statute since its inception, often due to administrative errors rather than fraud ^[15]. What has emerged in response is an inversion the conservative legal movement did not anticipate. Courts in both red and blue states have dismissed the DOJ's voter-data demands on the very federalism grounds the right once championed. Federal judges in Maine, Wisconsin, Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, and Rhode Island have thrown out the suits; Judge Walker called the claims "half-hearted" and noted they ignored traditional federalism practices ^[16]. West Virginia's Republican Secretary of State Mac Warner refused to comply, citing state law ^[17]. New Mexico's courts dismissed the demands as well ^[18]. And the DNC's litigation director, Daniel Freeman, argued against the federal voter-data demands on grounds that would have been at home in a Federalist Society brief a decade ago: "That's a state's right" and "the federal government has no authority under the United States Constitution to be telling states what the qualifications to vote are" ^[12]. The administration does reduce federal authority in one domain. It repealed the EPA's 2009 endangerment finding, removing federal authority to regulate greenhouse gases, and rolled back mercury emission limits ^[19]. But this is deregulation in service of business, not a principled deference to states. It never empowers a state to set a higher standard against federal wishes. The arrow still points one way. The result is that "federalism" has become a loyalty test. Compliant red states frame their cooperation as voluntary state authority. South Carolina's election director stressed "we stay in control" and "we can pull back and stop" after signing an agreement to share voter data ^[20]. Nebraska's Republican Secretary of State framed his voluntary transfer of voter data, including Social Security digits and driver's license numbers, as "state and county election officials remain in control" ^[17]. Resistance, meanwhile, is "lawless insurrection." The term has no stable meaning beyond which direction the arrow points. The doctrine of states' rights was built to resist federal overreach. It is now the principal barrier to this administration's expansion of it, and the administration's own selective use of the doctrine is the reason both things are true at once. A doctrine that means one thing when invoked by a red state and its opposite when invoked by a blue one cannot survive as a legal principle. It becomes a permission structure. The only question left is whether the courts will treat it as something more — and so far, they have. Judges in both red and blue states have applied the same federalism logic to dismiss the same voter-data demands. The administration's response has been to accelerate its appeals, pushing for a circuit split that would force the Supreme Court to choose between the doctrine's even application and the administration's directional one. That choice is now on the calendar.