How can blue states fight back against Trump? With fiscal disobedience -- Opinion piece by Eric Reinhart
This political anthropologist and psychologist in Chicago is serious. But the timing is everything.
We have three years ahead to survive and fight against the destruction of our government and democracy. Re the timing, it would be better to try this after we win the midterms.
IF, however, we have contested midterms, that alone would likely be the harbinger of the 2028 GE.
IF we were to lose 2028 because of some lie/cheat/steal schemes, our blue state governors would have no choice but to give this interstate fiscal campaign a try.
IF we lose both campaigns. Not saying we will. But this is still worth considering.
https://archive.ph/EvcBH
... article I, section 10 of the Constitution could offer an eventual tool: interstate compacts... With or without congressional approval, blue states could form a “fiscal sovereignty compact” to coordinate the legal, fiscal, and political strategies involved in holding federal taxes in trust. It could
-- standardize escrow mechanisms across member states, ensuring legal coherence and shared administrative capacity;
-- create a pooled legal defense fund to support court battles;
-- coordinate triggers for releasing funds, so that the federal government faces a unified set of demands; and
-- protect against selective federal retaliation by presenting a united front representing tens of millions of residents and trillions in economic output.
This compact would not need to involve all blue states to be effective. A coalition of economically powerful states – such as California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, and Washington – could represent a staggering share of federal revenue. If even a portion of federal tax remittances from these states were held in trust, the federal government would face not an isolated legal challenge but substantial fiscal obstacles to its current belligerence.
Trump’s use of the federal government to punish political enemies represents an authoritarian turn in American governance. It betrays the basic premise of federalism – that states are coequal entities within a constitutional framework, not mere provinces under imperial command – that was the supposed cornerstone of the Republican party before it sold what little soul it had to a conman. Lawsuits and press conferences are inadequate responses ... What’s needed are mechanisms that translate state and citizen dissent into material leverage. Interstate compact escrow accounts, when deployed through a coordinated strategy, do precisely this: they turn the flow of money, the lifeblood of federal power, into the explicit site of political struggle.
Such a move could have wide-rippling political effects.
It would give residents a concrete way to participate in opposing the Trump regime, transforming legal disputes into collective political action.
It would also force the supreme court, which is increasingly aligning itself with Trump against the constitution, to directly confront fundamental questions about the balance of state and federal power. Given the corruption of the courts, courtroom victory is neither the expectation nor the point in this strategy; it is instead to use the law to draw clear constitutional and fiscal battle lines – to make states active protagonists rather than passive targets.
Skeptics will call the above proposal unconstitutional, impractical or politically reckless. They are not wrong to note the risks. Under current federal tax law, states have no role in federal revenue collection. Courts might enjoin such efforts quickly. Administratively, state governments would need to build new fiscal infrastructure to receive and track payments. And Trump will seize on any opportunity to paint blue states as “insurrectionists” who must be violently crushed – but the regime is already inventing fictions to justify this ...
Acknowledging risks is not the same as accepting them as decisive.
The legal barriers to fiscal disobedience are formidable in part because the federal government has never before faced coordinated, large-scale challenges of this kind from wealthy states representing a majority of national tax revenue... Even if states ultimately lose in court, the process itself would publicly expose the authoritarian abuse of fiscal powers, force constitutional confrontation rather than quiet capitulation, and... reshape the political terrain.
State-administered escrow accounts will not solve the crisis of American democracy, but they could help shift the terrain of struggle away from unilateral federal domination and toward a contested, negotiated, and coordinated anti-fascist federalism much better equipped to contest the destruction of US democracy....
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