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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
The idea of “two Americas,” one rich and one poor, one blue and one red, has been around for decades. But now, thanks to Donald Trump, there will soon be fifty Americas.
Once the new president is able to sign executive orders, state governments take action to challenge them in court. The result will be a more confusing environment for businesses — and a richer one for lawyers — as blue states look for ways to protect themselves from immigration raids, weaker environmental regulations, Big Tech’s monopoly power and massive cuts in federal aid for everything from health care Emergency assistance.
The lawsuits, which were widespread during Trump’s first term, began again last week when Massachusetts, New Jersey and California led a group of 18 states that filed a lawsuit challenging the president’s executive order repealing birthright citizenship. Four other states filed a similar lawsuit. As Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell put it: “Birthright to citizenship. . . is a guarantee of equality born of a collective struggle against oppression. . . It is a right enshrined in our Constitution and recognized by the Supreme Court for more than a century.”
While one can only hope that today’s conservative court does not agree to a modern version of the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which banned citizenship for enslaved people, the fight will be expensive and protracted. Ironically, a series of Supreme Court rulings in late 2023 are actually making it much easier for individuals, businesses and aggrieved states to take on the federal government.
Blue state governments, for example, are taking over many of the Biden administration’s monopoly fights. Progressive Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has replaced former Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan as the face of the war against predatory ticket pricing, algorithmic manipulation of real estate markets, food monopolies and profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies.
States will also be the starting point for rolling back climate laws, including Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump repeatedly refers to as the “Green New Deal.” While the president may seek to rebrand some of the provisions that benefited red states as his own, he is foregoing subsidies for things like electric vehicles.
California is preparing for the coming climate fight. Between 2017 and 2021, the state sued the Trump administration 123 times, scoring multiple victories against environmental deregulation, although mostly on administrative grounds. This time, the Trump administration has experience and better bureaucratic skills. California has already withdrawn several requests it was granted under the Biden administration to enforce its own stricter pollution restrictions. And Trump is threatening to withhold federal disaster aid to LA unless the state changes its water management, blaming conservation efforts for the city’s inability to control the fires.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has requested $25 million from the state budget to cover expected legal costs in the fight against Trump. The state will also use the power of its own massive economy (the fifth largest in the world) to strike deals with large companies that meet its own clean energy standards, as it did with major global automakers during Trump’s first term.
This is an important point. Blue states are home to most of the country’s largest and richest consumers. They can create strong demand signals for the rest of the country, even if the president doesn’t like it. For example, if the New York City Housing Authority decides to introduce a certain type of window, it can set industry standards for years to come. If California, New York, Illinois, or Massachusetts choose a particular type of technology platform for public education systems, a particular food safety rule, or a particular approach to labor and AI, it could tip the scales in how companies proceed.
Of course, the economic appeal of doing business in such places is also weighed against the associated regulatory burdens, especially compared to red states that will happily adopt Trump’s laissez-faire deregulatory agenda. A friend of mine who runs a small business recently spent a year and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to safely fire a lazy and possibly argumentative person she had hired in California who was working remotely. Her successor comes from business-friendly Tennessee.
Historically, US states tend to band together best when fighting against something, and this time is no different. Last November, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis launched a new group called Governors Safeguarding Democracy with the goal of pooling resources to combat the Trump agenda. Pritzker, for example, said he would not cooperate if Trump tried to use National Guard units from red states for deportations to blue states. Would California send resources to help?
We hope that such questions continue to be the subject of dystopian films. The reality is that blue states, many of which are running large deficits, will have to find ways to cope with reduced fiscal support from Washington. Conservatives are already calling for a new fiscal federalism and blaming overgrown state budgets for the national debt problem. There’s no prize for guessing where to make the first cuts.
