THE GOVERNORS’ MUTINY
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-governors-mutiny/91093/
President Trump clearly overstated the case when he asserted that the president’s authority in the current crisis is “total.” The fact is that the Constitution doesn’t grant total authority to any branch of the government. It looks, though, at least to us, as if Mr. Trump was set off by news that some states were entering into regional compacts to plan the reopening of their economies.
If that is what set Mr. Trump off, it’s easy to see why. Mr. Trump and all other officers and legislators and judges of the federal and state governments are bound by oath to the Constitution. Yet that same parchment absolutely forbids the states, without the consent of Congress, from entering into “any agreement or compact with another state”
That is American bedrock. It’s right up there with the prohibition on states granting titles of nobility, say, or keeping ships of war in time of peace. One doesn’t have to be a Civil War buff to see that states forming compacts or agreements with other states smacks of a challenge to federal authority, no matter how un-total a president’s authority might be.
Yet a bloom of stories in the press suggests states have begun doing just what the Constitution says they can’t. “Governors Form Compacts to Coordinate Reopening Society” is the headline in the New York Times. Governor Cuomo is boasting of the compact being formed between New York and its near neighbors like New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
In reporting what Washington, Oregon, and California are doing, the Guardian’s choice of word was that they’d “agreed” to a framework. Again, absent an okay from Congress, states can’t form with another state “any” compact or agreement. If there’s any effort to get approval from Congress, we haven’t been able to find word of it in the press.
Let us pause here to note that the Sun opposes pedantry. Plus, too, we understand that the Constitution grants an exception to the compact prohibition in cases where a state has been “actually invaded” or is “in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.” It’s hard to see, though, where in our electronic age it’s difficult for Mr. Cuomo to seek a congressional okay.
What gets us, in any event, is the way the Democrats are dragging out of every constitutional saloon some law professor to declaim on what an ignoramus the president is — while also ignoring the way the states are blowing past the compact and agreement clause. In respect of the Constitution, it seems to us, one needs to be in for the goose as well as the gander.
Nor is our concern merely academic. Mr. Trump may not be, as he suggested, facing a “mutiny,” even if the governors’ policies differ from the President’s. Tens of thousands of lives are in jeopardy in the battle against the coronavirus, though, and people are scared. A whiff, if only a whiff, of violence is n the air as some states or even towns try to keep out strangers.
We aren’t predicting that things will get out of hand in America. It’s not, though, a possibility to ignore completely. Careful leadership is at a premium at every level of government just now. This is a moment when everyone — not just the president, but the governors and the press — needs to stay within the constitutional traces.
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