Inter-state compacts are effective in preventing federal overreach
Dranias 14 [Nick Dranias serves as General Counsel for Honduras Prospera Inc. and its affiliates, handling all corporate legal matters. Prior to this, he was Senior Litigation Counsel with the Government Accountability & Special Litigation Unit of the Arizona Attorney General. He has served as President & Executive Director of Compact for America Educational Foundation where he led national efforts to organize the states to propose and ratify a federal Balanced Budget Amendment. Prior to that, he was General Counsel, Policy Development Director and Constitutional Policy Director at the Goldwater Institute. At the Loyola University Chicago School of Law he served on the Loyola University Chicago Law Review. He graduated cum laude from Boston University with a B.A. in Economics and Philosophy, 9/27/14, ‘Federalism DIY: Ten Ways for States to Check and Balance Washington’, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1705429, SSRN] A.J.
Interstate Compacts Can Powerfully Coordinate Collective State Action
As their proliferation suggests, interstate compacts are a powerful tool for exerting state sovereignty. Each state to a compact has the power to enforce the compact through the remedy of specific performance because the enforceability of compacts is guaranteed under the Contracts Clause and an exception to the rule that one legislature cannot bind future legislatures.425 Thus, the coordinated action that interstate compacts make possible could exponentially increase the effectiveness of all the tools discussed previously by enabling a unified front among the states and by helping overcome collective action problems