Texas declares war

INDIGNITY VOL. 4, NO. 16

THE WORST THING WE READ™

If 25 States Announce They Reject Federal Authority, Does It Make the News?

ON WEDNESDAY, TEXAS Gov. Greg Abbott—chief executive of a state containing nearly 9 percent of the population of the United States—declared himself superior to the federal government. After the Supreme Court ruled, by a bare 5–4 majority, that the Texas National Guard could not fence the United States Border Patrol away from the border of the United States, Abbot put out a letter attacking the Biden Administration's handling of immigration, and announcing that the state would make its own border policy.

"I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself," Abbot wrote. "That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary."

By Thursday, two dozen Republican state governors had issued a statement saying they "stand in solidarity" with Abbott. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, wrote that he urged "all willing states to deploy their guards to Texas."

As of Friday morning, the New York Times still had not published a news story about the fact that half of the United States was rejecting the authority of the federal government. A search for "Greg Abbott" on CNN's website pulled up no stories about the letter. The Washington Post had put Abbott's letter into columnist Philip Bump's timeline of the "increasingly tense dispute between Texas and the federal government," but had not addressed the news as news in its own right.