By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
In the first month of President Trump’s second term, both he himself and several of his key cabinet members have made the news, for “threatening” several big city mayors and even governors.
Was that a good idea?
The once-mainstream media are horrified at the thought that a presidential administration would dare to “bully” mayors and governors. Don’t they know about the separation of powers, after all, we are asked? Don’t they know to stay in their lane?
The media didn’t react this way when it was a Democrat White House attacking our state governments.
Recent Democrat regimes have virtually shut down the oil and gas drilling and the coal mining that both power and enrich numerous states. Where is Alaska without oil? Where is Pennsylvania without coal? Washington, DC Democrats, when in power, have used that power to demolish the auto industry in Michigan by virtually banning the internal combustion engine.
Obama and Biden spent their terms crippling Texas and Arizona by forcing a mass invasion at their borders, swamping police and schools, bankrupting hospitals, and overwhelming their social safety nets.
But now the Left is raising a ruckus because the Trump administration is insisting that states and cities obey the law?
That’s the real outrage. What are these fights about?
So-called “sanctuary” cities, counties, and states – such as Illinois Gov JB Pritzker (D) and New York Gov Kathy Hochul (D) – are welcoming in illegal aliens by the millions, blatantly refusing to support and cooperate with federal law enforcement (such as ICE) in identifying and removing these aliens. So-called “trans-friendly” governors like Wisconsin Gov Tony Evers (D) and Maine Gov Janet Mills (D) are fighting against our society’s urgent need to protect young women in sports teams from young men who “identify as women.”
Politically and ideologically, culturally and rationally, the Trump administration is of course on the right side of these issues. The 2024 election certainly confirmed an overwhelming desire on the part of the body politic to move back to common sense on these issues and end the radicalism of recent Democrat tyranny. Parents of young children want their girls to be safe on sports teams from having mediocre boys don a girl’s swimsuit and take the girls’ hard-earned medals from them. Towns dependent on coal plants, oil wells and natural gas pipelines have a right to continue to prosper without crazed climate alarmists working from home at the EPA to shut down their cities and states’ very way of life.
But it’s another aspect of this – the “separation of powers” question – where the media could be doing real damage, and where the media needs to be corrected most. The public understands the issues and is right on them. The public knows the foolishness of the carbon dioxide hysteria, the destructiveness of open borders and the cruelty of taking women’s sports away from women. But since the “separation of powers” issue isn’t well taught in school, there is real risk in leaving this issue unaddressed.
Should the president have the right to argue with a governor in her own state? Should a federal law enforcement administrator have the right to harass a mayor in his own city? Weren’t these mayors and governors empowered by their own constituents to do what they campaigned on, whether this faraway president likes it or not?
Well, that’s where the Founding philosophy of our nation comes into it.
The U.S. Constitution was written to do two things: to lay out a framework for the federal government, and to limit what that federal government is allowed to do. So we have, on the one hand, a set of rules about the House and Senate, the Presidency and Judiciary, laying out their terms of office and their respective responsibilities – and on the other hand, both a laundry list of what each is to do and a specific set of instructions on what they must not touch. The U.S. Constitution limits federal power. And the federal government, after all, is a creation of the states, a contract between these fifty states and the federal government, giving the federal government power only to the extent that this power is in the Constitution. All else (as the tenth amendment explains) is reserved to the states, or to the people.
Our schools rarely frame it that way. They talk about how the House does this and the Senate does that, the President signs it and the Judges interpret it, but they don’t talk about the big picture, the fundamental point of our Founding Fathers, which is:
Our government was founded to protect the rights of its citizens, to give the citizenry a functioning economy and legal structure so that its people could live and prosper in a free environment, burdened by as little “governance” as possible.
Contrary to what Barack Obama famously declared – when he cockily said “I have a phone and a pen” – our government, at all levels, is limited.
No official, federal, state, or local, is allowed to do “anything they want” just because they won. This nation was constructed as it was with the intention of keeping its government as small as possible, even as the nation grew.
Our Founding Fathers had studied maps; they anticipated massive growth westward, possibly all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The laws they wrote, both in the federal and state constitutions, were constructed to limit government, not just in the nation’s capital, but at every level.
So when elected officials – at any level – blow past those limits, and imagine an ability to do whatever they want, in spite of the law and the founding principle of limited government, it is the job of other branches and other levels of government to slap them back down.
When local park districts and school districts closed off public taxpayer-funded playgrounds during the Covid-19 “pandemic”, other levels of government SHOULD have arrested the commissioners for doing so. When mayors and governors similarly ordered churches shut down (or limited services to “only every other pew” or “every third seat”) in defiance of the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause, those mayors and governors too should have been arrested, along with any county commissioners, aldermen or legislators who voted for it for such an outrage.
The judiciary moves too slowly to react to massive issues like these. When a state or local elected official blatantly violates either the Constitution or other constitutionally authorized federal law, you can’t just wait for years hoping the Supreme Court will rule right on the matter in ten or twenty years.
We have federal law enforcement to enforce constitutional federal law; if a state, county or city violates it, the supremacy of the US Constitution, and of the Founders’ philosophy of personal liberty, outranks such local criminals as governors Pritzker and Hochul.
If they say “but our constituents elected us to do this radical measure!”, we can remind them that our nation’s constituents also elected President Trump to do the opposite, and he outranks them. But that is not the key argument.
If we are a nation of property rights and the rule of law, then all property, all human lives, nationwide, must be protected. We simply cannot allow a few radical governors to welcome in foreign cartels and their drug dealers, their rapists, their burglars, brawlers and killers. We have enough native-born criminals in this country; it’s hard enough to control them. When a public official invites in hundreds of thousands more, that public official must be treated as if he were one of them.
For a decade now, we have seen girls in presumably girls’ high school and college sports injured in championships by bigger, tougher boys, having their medals, records, and college scholarships taken from them by these boys who simply don’t belong there. Politicians who favor this abuse of women have no business in public office, and if they use their power to enable this outrage, they do belong in jail.
And for over a generation, these blue “sanctuary” cities, counties and states have flooded the nation with illegal aliens. As much as we may want to blame Obama’s and Biden’s policies – and yes, both do deserve it – these “sanctuary” declarations bear much of the blame as well, acting as a magnet to draw criminals and welfare abusers into our communities amongst the other desperate migrants.
The mayor, alderman, legislator or governor who illegally welcomes in these MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gangs with a sanctuary declaration isn’t some theoretical philosopher outside the issue; he’s an enabler, a facilitator, often a funder, and certainly, an accessory to every crime they commit.
These are not local or state issues. Sports competitions and college scholarships cross state lines. Illegal alien vote fraud poisons federal elections as well as local ones. The crime committed by illegal aliens permeates the body politic; it’s never limited to a single neighborhood or city. And the cost, the massive cost to everything from housing to policing, from healthcare to the welfare state, is crippling the nation.
So, yes, the federal government has not just a right but an obligation to enforce federal law when the petty tyrants of blue and purple states refuse to behave as the constitutional officials of a free country.
It’s not about the choices, whims, or cockeyed fantasies of a few local or state officials. It’s about the rights of every law-abiding American citizen to live in the free society our nation’s Founding Fathers envisioned for us. This is not a democracy, thank Heaven; it’s a constitutional republic dedicated to the liberty of its law-abiding citizens.
And if JB Pritzker, Kathy Hochul, Janet Mills, or Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) insist on abusing their offices to endanger the nation, then yes, the current crop of feds is already long overdue in freeing their constituents from such longstanding and tyrannical misrepresentation and abuse of the public trust.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
