SPRINGFIELD, Ill.—Capitol Hill lawmakers may not always be sure how best and when to resist the right-wing schemes of Republican President-elect Donald Trump but three Democratic governors—J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gavin Newsom of California and Jared Polis of Colorado—have no qualms about opposing Trump’s plans. They’re planning how to do so.
That bodes well for workers and their unions, who will find themselves, like Democratic governors, proclaimed as “enemies” of the coming Republican regime, and caught in Trump’s crosshairs.
Pritzker, one of the nation’s most pro-worker governors, runs a deep-blue state. He’s already warned Trump that if he tries anything to hurt Illinoisans, “He’ll have to go through me.”
In particular, Pritzker and Polis want governors, regardless of party, to resist Trump attacks on the Constitution and the rights it grants.
And California’s Newsom, whose state and legislature are as deep blue as Pritzker’s Illinois, has already reminded Trump “This is the United States of America.” He emphasized the Golden State, with one-eighth of the U.S. population and with an economy which would be the world’s fifth-largest if it was a separate country, can afford to go it alone.
The three governors are taking different tacks to tackle Trump. Newsom called a special session of the legislature to ask for additional appropriations to finance California’s defense, especially in issues around the green economy, fossil fuel restrictions and worker rights. California has been in the vanguard on those for at least a decade.
Pritzker and Polis—whose state is more moderate—launched a coalition seeking support from like-minded governors to file lawsuits and stimulate grass-roots campaigns against Trump and his hard-right ideas. Polis chairs the National Governors Association, a post which rotates between the parties.
They seek public support for funds for their group, Governors Safeguarding Democracy. Their top goal, Pritzker said in a recent news conference and TV interview, is to save the nation from the threat of Trump authoritarianism. They’re asking Republican governors to join them and thus “leverage collective experience and institutional knowledge to protect the rule of law,” Pritzker said.
Hope alone won’t do it
“We know simple hope alone won’t save our democracy. We need to work together, especially at the state level, to protect and strengthen it,” added Polis at the press conference.
“Each governor has good ideas worth sharing across state lines with one another about how to safeguard our states from what we think might be an onslaught from the federal government to take powers away from the states and/or to actually violate the Constitution,” Pritzker elaborated in the PBS interview.
“We want to know, I want to know, what governors across the country, whether they be Republican or Democrat, have—what their ideas are for pushing back. In Illinois, we have done a number of things to protect, for example, reproductive rights. Other states may not have taken those actions.”
The Pritzker-Polis pushback against the federal government is not new. Indeed, tension between the states and the feds has been an underlying theme throughout U.S. history, stretching back to the Revolution through secession threats, the Civil War, “states’ rights” opposition to civil rights and in the last four years, Texas-led opposition, aiding and abetting the corporate class, to pro-worker Biden administration regulations.
And the original U.S. “constitution,” the Articles of Confederation, established a weak central government. When the Founders met behind closed doors to “revise” it, those white men, all of the merchant or landowning upper class, ripped it up instead. The result was a centralized presidency, which has only grown more so over succeeding centuries.
Unionists should be concerned about Trump’s constitutional threats. Past rightist presidents and governors sent troops and/or the National Guard to violently put down worker protests.
Pro-corporate Democratic President Grover Cleveland dispatched troops to move the mails and break the Pullman Strike, over the opposition of Illinois Democratic Gov. John Peter Altgeld. President Woodrow Wilson let Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer touch off a “Red Scare” with mass arrests and deportations of militants and labor leaders just over a century ago. Wilson’s own Labor Secretary voided Palmer’s moves against lesser-known leaders.
And Democrat Harry Truman planned to send troops to operate U.S. coal mines, again to break a United Mine Workers strike, just after World War II. The strike was settled literally as Truman was announcing his plan to Congress.
Trump has other constitutional threats, Pritzker told PBS.
One is to force states to deputize state and local police to help federal agents round up undocumented people, including workers, for Trump’s planned mass deportations. He’s especially worried by one facet: Sending red-state cops to help arrest people in blue states.
“And how do we deal with the fact that the Trump administration, when it comes into office, apparently wants to re-impose prayer in public schools?” he asked. “That can sound like it’s something that would be a Supreme Court issue, but it may be they’re going to try to take away funding from our schools if, in fact, we’re upholding the separation of church and state.
“So how do we push back on that? The point is, we have a lot of very smart governors across the country, and we will work in a bipartisan fashion to try to solve these problems.”
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