An Open Letter to the Governors of America

Photo by Nico Smit on Unsplash

You swore an oath.

Not to a party. Not to a president. Not to your donors or your ambitions or the comfortable arrangements of political life that make the exercise of power feel like its own justification. You swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and to the constitution of your state. And that oath is not a formality. It is not a ritual utterance at the beginning of a term of office, to be set aside when honoring it becomes inconvenient.

It is a promise to the people you govern. And the people you govern need you to keep it. Now. Today.

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Federal agencies are operating under color of Article II in ways that no plain reading of the law supports. An unauthorized war — prosecuted without a declaration of Congress, without the authorization that Article I Section 8 requires, without the consent of the governed — is producing consequences that will arrive at your doorstep whether you act or not. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. The energy shock now entering the global trade system will reach your citizens’ grocery bills, their heating costs, the price of everything that moves by ship, with a force that no state budget was designed to absorb. And it is coming faster than the federal government has any incentive to acknowledge.

Ignored court orders. Masked federal agents in the streets operating without regard to the Bill of Rights. An executive branch that has decided the constitutional order is an obstacle rather than the foundation of its authority. These are not policy disagreements. They are not the ordinary friction of separated powers. They are the evidence of something that deserves its right name.

You know what it is. Say it.

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The constitutional argument for action is not novel and it is not radical. The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government. You are not an administrative subdivision of Washington. You are a sovereign executive within your sphere, and that sovereignty carries with it the authority — and the obligation — to protect your citizens from federal overreach.

The Supreme Court established in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer that when the president acts contrary to the will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb. He possesses only what the Constitution directly grants him, minus any congressional restriction. An unauthorized war does not fall within that grant. A governor who declares a state of emergency on the basis that federal agencies are operating outside their lawful authority is not acting radically. She is applying settled constitutional law at the state level. She is saying: the federal government is acting in a zone where it has no lawful authority, and we have an independent constitutional obligation to our citizens that we will not subordinate to unlawful federal action.

This is not interposition. This is not nullification. This is a governor doing her job.

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I want to speak to the practical argument as well, because the constitutional case does not require you to be purely idealistic to act on it.

The supply shock from the Strait of Hormuz will arrive at the state level long before the federal government has any political incentive to acknowledge it. A governor who declares a state of emergency now activates her state’s emergency management apparatus before the crisis fully lands. She positions her government to cushion the blow to her citizens. She creates a legal record that the harm was foreseeable and that the state took steps to mitigate it. She signals to her congressional delegation that the situation is no longer a matter of abstract constitutional principle — it is an immediate emergency that requires immediate action.

That is what emergency powers are for. The mechanism exists. Use it.

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I am aware that some of you are calculating. That you are weighing the political cost of action against the political cost of inaction. That you are telling yourself there is still time, that the ordinary instruments of political accountability will eventually produce the correction that is needed, that the moment does not yet require the kind of courage that ends careers and makes enemies.

I want to be honest with you about what that calculation looks like from where I sit.

It looks like the kind of reasoning that historians record with considerable unkindness. The people who stood still while the republic burned did not lack intelligence. They did not lack information. They lacked the willingness to pay the price that the moment required. And the price they refused to pay was paid instead by the people they governed — with interest, compounded, across years and decades of consequences that could have been mitigated had someone with power chosen to act when acting was still possible.

You have power. The moment is now. The consequences of inaction are not abstract. They are being priced into global energy markets as you read this.

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The founders designed the federal system with this moment in mind. Not this specific moment — they could not have imagined the particular form this crisis has taken. But they understood, from hard experience, that executives with unchecked power tend in time toward exactly what we are watching now. They designed a remedy. They distributed power across branches and across levels of government precisely so that when one level failed, another could act. They placed the states between the federal government and the people as a structural safeguard against the consolidation of authority in a single executive.

You are that safeguard. This is what it looks like when the safeguard is needed.

Declare the emergency. Protect the people. Honor the oath.

The founders were not sentimental men. They did not build this republic on the assumption that its leaders would always act from virtue. They built it on the assumption that its structure would force action when virtue was insufficient. The structure is calling on you now.

History is watching. Your children are watching. The people you govern are watching.

Act.