Thank goodness for state governments. One of the most underappreciated stories in 2025 was the role states played in checking federal overreach. As the Trump administration barreled through norms, rules and laws, state officials \u2014 sometimes from both parties \u2014 supplied the friction to slow the administration\u2019s power grab.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump swept into power with Republican control over both chambers of Congress, but he avoided working with Congress as much as possible. He spent the first year of his second term pushing the bounds of executive power. As his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told a Vanity Fair journalist: Trump \u201coperates [with] a view that there\u2019s nothing he can\u2019t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Congress\u00a0may have rolled over, but at the state level, things played out pretty much the way America\u2019s founders intended. As\u00a0James Madison\u00a0wrote in Federalist No. 45: \u201cThe powers delegated by the proposed\u00a0Constitution\u00a0to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.\u201d<\/p>\n
Madison and his fellow visionaries settled upon a system that enshrined in the\u00a0U.S.\u00a0Constitution\u00a0the legal authority for states to protect the freedoms of their residents and uphold the rule of law when the federal government abused its power.<\/p>\n
Trump gave them ample opportunity to do that right out of the gate. Between Jan. 20 and Dec. 18, he signed 221 executive orders \u2014 more than he signed in the four years of his first term.<\/p>\n
But that approach infringed on many fundamental rights held by states. Many of those executive orders intruded upon state authority over administering elections and enforcing crime. Twenty-two states sided with the\u00a0District of Columbia\u00a0to successfully stop the Trump administration from federalizing the\u00a0National Guard\u00a0to be deployed to\u00a0Washington, although the decision has been paused to allow for appeal. Twenty-three states joined with\u00a0Illinois\u00a0and\u00a0Chicago\u00a0to oppose the administration\u2019s federalizing of\u00a0Illinois National Guard\u00a0troops. And 12 states joined\u00a0Oregon\u00a0to challenge the use of the president\u2019s emergency powers to impose import tariffs on\u00a0Canada,\u00a0Mexico\u00a0and\u00a0China.<\/p>\n
An analysis from States United, a nonpartisan organization that supports state officials and law enforcement leaders, found that at least 33 of Trump\u2019s orders are facing federal court challenges and 10 have either been blocked or paused while a court reviews them \u2014 from Trump ending the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, to his order to reject absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day. Many of the lower court orders are still pending rulings in the appellate courts, but they have served to slow the speed with which Trump can dismantle state protections.<\/p>\n
State pushback is important, not only to preserve state constitutional authority, but also because the American people don\u2019t approve of Trump\u2019s approach on many of these issues. A Reuters\/Ipsos poll in September, for example, found that 7 in 10\u00a0Democrats\u00a0and half of\u00a0Republicans\u00a0didn\u2019t want the president to send armed troops into American cities unless those cities face an external threat.<\/p>\n
Remarkably,\u00a0Alexander Hamilton\u00a0predicted this 238 years ago this month when he wrote, in Federalist No. 17, that because states \u201cwill generally possess the confidence and good-will of the people,\u201d they can use that popular support to \u201coppose all encroachments of the national government.\u201d<\/p>\n
The conservative majority on the\u00a0Supreme Court\u00a0has demonstrated that it will continue to expand the president\u2019s power despite the limits intended by the nation\u2019s founders.\u00a0Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United, thinks the ultimate test of Trump\u2019s executive overreach won\u2019t be in the courts. \u201cWe\u2019re going to win or lose it in the court of public opinion,\u201d she told me. \u201cAt the end of the day, the power here is in the hands of the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next challenge will be for states to make sure the Trump administration doesn\u2019t attempt to tip the scales in November, when voters will decide every seat in the U.S. House and 33 seats in the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been heartening to watch states step up and become a bulwark against federal overreach. But next year, there is much more to do.<\/p>\n
Mary Ellen Klas\u00a0is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the\u00a0Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thank goodness for state governments. One of the most underappreciated stories in 2025 was the role states played…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375073,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,2558,3,1767,55607,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-375072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-latest-headlines","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-columnists","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}