Democratic states work to thwart President Donald Trump's initiatives

Maryland lawmakers recently gave the state attorney general the authority to sue the Trump administration – on anything the state's top lawyer wants. Nevada lawmakers are hard at work on legislation to expand voter registration and protect voting rights, a preemptive move to counter what majority-party Democrats in the state legislature believe is a looming Trump "voter suppression" effort. And sunny California is establishing itself as a veritable liberal oasis in Trump-land, providing extensive assistance to immigrants without legal status while negotiating legislation that would make the world's sixth largest economy a so-called "sanctuary state" further protecting the undocumented.
Call it the Revolt of the Blue States, a legal and legislative effort by Democratic legislatures and governors to thwart initiatives by President Donald Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress on a wide swath of issues. From health care to immigration to climate change, Trump policies and promises are facing a defiant pushback from Democratic lawmakers and attorneys general determined to limit the impact Trump can have on their resident's day-to-day lives.
"The United States is made up of 50 states, and we have independent rights separate and apart from the federal government. There are things we can do and have done," says Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, who heads the Democratic Governors Association. While the feds indeed have wide berth when it comes to national matters such as immigration policy, "we're going to protect our citizens and our residents. We're going to honor our refugees. We're going to make sure that Planned Parenthood survives in our states," Malloy pledges.
On the other coast, "California is becoming a beacon for Americans looking for hope as we enter the Trump era, an era that promises to be the most regressive in generations," says California Democratic state Sen. Kevin DeLeon, the president pro tempore of the chamber. "We have made it very clear we will protect our people, our economic prosperity and the values that made our state great."
Red state lawmakers surely pushed back against former President Barack Obama, with mixed success. Some refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. But the 28 states that sought, jointly or individually, to eliminate the administrative fulcrum of the law – the individual insurance mandate – lost in a landmark Supreme Court case. A 26-state challenge to Obama's orders protecting as many as five million immigrants who are in the country without legal status from deportation succeeded in lower courts and was upheld with a 4-4 tie in the short-handed U.S. Supreme Court last year.
Arizona tried to expand immigration enforcement with a "show me your papers" law requiring law enforcement officials to ask for documentation from people suspected of being in the country illegally, but most of that law was struck down by the high court. But Democrats, largely spurred by Trump's stunning victory last November, are signifying they will be far more aggressive in attempting to carve out safe spaces from Republican policies.
Governors and attorneys general moved quickly after Trump issued his travel ban executive order to ban entry into the U.S. by Syrian refugees and residents of seven majority-Muslim nations. And they were successful (for the time being, anyway), winning several judicial rulings lifting the travel ban while the underlying matter wends through the courts.
And the revolt goes far beyond lawsuits, and far beyond immigration. While Democratic lawmakers are at a numerical disadvantage – they have 16 governorships and control of 13 state legislatures, with four legislatures having divided control – they are seeking to make their states havens from Trump, to the degree the law allows. And they're not waiting around to see if Trump is able to fulfill his campaign promises.
So Trump and the GOP Congress want to undo the ACA? Oregon is fighting back, with Democratic lawmakers offering a "Reproductive Health Equity Act" requiring insurers to offer birth control and other reproductive services – including abortion – without any co-payment or deductible. The push started before the election, but "I definitely think that the threats to Planned Parenthood and other things going on right now are why we're seeing such enthusiastic efforts from people who are ready to get involved," says Sarah Armstrong of the Oregon ACLU, one of a coalition of groups fighting for the reproductive rights law. Legislators in Rhode Island and Illinois are both working on legislation to protect abortion rights, amid worries the Trump administration will try to roll back rights through court appointments and other measures, says Carolyn Fiddler, spokeswoman for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which works to get Democrats elected to state legislative bodies.
And if Medicaid expansion is imperiled by a potential elimination of Obamacare? Malloy says states will fight back. "We may have certain financial commitments they have made to us that we can seek to enforce in court," says Malloy, a former prosecutor.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo set up a hotline and offered legal assistance to those affected by the travel ban, and their families, when the order was still in effect. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown issued an executive order making it illegal for state agencies to discriminate based on immigration status. The order also forbids state agencies from using public resources to help create a religious registry. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf took it personally, welcoming a Syrian family affected by the ban and pledging to pay for the family's airfare with his own money.
Nevada – where Democrats flipped control of both chambers of the state's legislature in their favor last November – lawmakers are moving ahead on efforts to improve both access and ease of voting, says Aaron Ford, the Democratic majority leader of the state Senate.
"Trump and his staff are telling us about voter fraud," while there is no evidence of such mass fraud, Ford says. He fully expects the Trump administration to use unsubstantiated allegations of fraud to mount a "voter suppression campaign."
In response, Nevada legislators are working to extend early voting hours, make technological upgrades to voting machinery, extend voter pre-registration for 17-year-olds who will be 18 by Election Day and institute same-day voter registration to increase turnout by legal voters. In addition, Nevada will use its "limited resources" not to step up enforcement of federal immigration laws – though Ford emphasizes Democrats do not want to disobey the law – but to keep Silver Staters "safe in their day-to-day lives."
"I think it's important for us to protect our citizens," Ford says. "We were duly elected to put fourth the policies to protect the well-being of our citizens," even if those state priorities don't sync with those of the Trump administration, he adds.
California is arguably the most ambitious and wide-ranging in its legal and regulatory show-down with Trump. The state provides drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants as well as heath care for children of immigrants without legal status. Gov. Jerry Brown's budget includes money to pay for legal representation for undocumented immigrants who might be swept up in federal raids. The state has a sweeping climate change law requiring, among other things, that half the state's electricity be generated by renewable sources such as solar and wind by the year 2030.
While some localities have deemed themselves "sanctuary cities," California legislators are working on legislation to extend that policy statewide. Making California a "Trust State," DeLeon says, doesn't mean federal authorities set up checkpoints or otherwise enforce immigration laws, but it would mean state authorities won't go out of their way to help. "We want to make sure that California taxpayer dollars are not used as a cog in the Trump deportation machine to separate children from their mothers," DeLeon says. "In California, we celebrate diversity and profit from it. We don't deport it. We don't wall it off and we don't ban it," the Senate leader says.
Such state actions could lead to battles in the courts, experts say, especially if the federal government tries to punish states for making their own policies in opposition to Trump administration initiatives. "Both sides seem to be really spoiling for a conflict," says David Martin, a University of Virginia School of Law professor and former lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump's executive order calls for so-called sanctuary cities to be denied federal funds (except as proscribed by law). In fact, "it's really not possible for the federal government to cut off all federal funding, even to these jurisdictions of non-compliance," Martin says, noting the U.S. Supreme Court case upholding the Affordable Care Act. Congress can attach conditions to certain funding, but only if it's related to the program receiving federal cash, he says. Congress, for example, pushed states to increase their drinking ages to 21 by passing a law that would deny them 5 percent of their federal highway funds if they did not comply – connected because of the highway safety rule.
Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, says the situation could end up encouraging a new dialogue on federalism, and a rapprochement between Red and Blue State America, with different states doing things there own way on a number of issues. "I do wish more people would have a general commitment to the idea that the federal government should not have the sweeping powers it has," Somin says. "My hope is that the rise of Trump will help convince people on the left that they can make federalism great again." Whether the states or the Trump administration will prevail is a question most likely to be decided in a courtroom.