Will Bunch’s latest column, “Eagle Pass is today’s Fort Sumter. Biden must federalize the Texas National Guard. made me roll my eyes. Even though I floated the same solution to the border standoff earlier this week, the notion that a governor defying a court order is equivalent to opening shots of a literal civil war is absurd. For that matter, not only would federalizing the state militias not have been an appropriate solution to that attack, it would have been impossible.
No, the more obvious parallel was state defiance of court orders to desegregate public schools and universities, which led Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy to federalize the Arkansas and Alabama National Guards, respectively. I strongly suspect that, like Orville Faubus and George Wallace, Gregg Abbott is a grandstanding yahoo but will ultimately obey the law when forced to do so.
Alas, then there’s a certain former President for whom I can not say the same.
Vice (“Trump Calls on ‘All Willing States’ to Send National Guard Soldiers to Texas“):
Like pouring water on a grease fire, former President Donald Trump has weighed in on the escalating standoff between the federal government and Texas.
In a multi-part social media post shared Thursday night, Trump called on “all willing states” to deploy their national guard forces to Texas “to prevent the entry of illegals, and to remove them back across the Border.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Tucker Carlson on Friday, that so far, ten governors had sent National Guard or other law enforcement resources to assist on the border, and will be “disappointed” if others do not follow suit.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt told Fox News on Friday that he also “absolutely” plans to send national guard soldiers to Texas. ““We’ve already started putting the numbers together,” said Stitt.
(Less than 24 hours earlier, Stitt joined Newsmax host Carl Higbie for a casual chat about potential “force-on-force conflict” breaking out at the border.)
Stitt is one of 25 red state governors who have released statements expressing support for Abbott, who is continuing to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this week that found that the federal government, not states, have ultimate jurisdiction over border enforcement.
The Court’s 5-4 ruling gave a green light to Border Control to cut down the miles of razor wire that Texas forces had erected without federal permission along the Rio Grande and around Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, which is an epicenter for unauthorized border crossings.
[…]
Abbott has doubled down on border enforcement activity since the Supreme Court ruling. He published a strongly-worded letter on Wednesday that accused the Biden Administration of abdicating its constitutional responsibility to protect states from “invasion.” “The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the states,” Abbott asserted.
Abbott cited a dissenting opinion from the 2012 Supreme Court case Arizona v. United States that argued that states have a constitutional authority to protect themselves if the federal government fails to.
Cori Alonso-Yoder, an associate professor from George Washington University Law School’s Fundamentals of Lawyering Program, told VICE News that she believes Abbott’s statement falls “more into the realm of political theater than actual supported legal theory.”
While we’re not quite in 1860 territory here, this is just dangerous. A constitutional republic depends on a respect for the rule of law. To the extent there’s room for interpretation on where state and federal authority ends, it’s perfectly normal for one side or the other to test that limit. But it’s crucial that, once the legal process ends—in this case, with a clear Supreme Court ruling—that the parties abide by the outcome. That Abbott remains in defiance and that Trump and Stitt are strongly implying that said defiance should escalate to armed conflict is beyond alarming.
