It’s the status quo, disproving spillover AND is worse because red states will exploit the precedent for their own interests.

The role of state legislatures in national affairs has become both more prominent and more conflictual in recent years. Due to various political forces—partisan polarization, the Trump presidency, Republican gains in Congress beginning in 2010, congressional gridlock, and growing overlap in federal and state spheres of authority—blue states are resisting federal policies in arenas such as immigration, tax reform, and marijuana as well as filling in the vacuum left by federal inaction on progressive priorities such as the minimum wage and gun control. Meanwhile, red states are increasingly preempting blue-city policies—ranging from antidiscrimination to environmental laws—with the effect of shoring up the GOP’s policy agenda.1

Republican control of national government has contributed to a dramatic realignment of partisan positions on matters of federalism in recent years (Goelzhauser and Rose 2017). Although the GOP traditionally championed states’ rights, the Trump administration has sought to impose wide-ranging national policies that implicate the states, from stricter enforcement of federal law against the use of marijuana to executive orders restricting immigration. Meanwhile, Democrats—long champions of federal policy intervention—having lost control of the national government, concluded “they have no alternative but to redouble their efforts at the local level” (Rosen 2016). Although “progressive federalism” had long been an oxymoron, at least since the New Deal, the Trump era seems to have prompted a liberal reawakening to the advantages of localism as a tool for resisting the encroachments of an assertive national government.

Disputes between the national government and the states are hardly new. Examples of what Bulman-Pozen and Gerken (2009) refer to as “uncooperative federalism” abound, dating back to the nation’s founding. Tensions mounted throughout the twentieth century as federal policy expanded and increasingly implicated the states. The New Deal and Great Society in particular ushered in an intrusive new set of regulations and grant-in-aid conditions, and state officials often resented the burdens they imposed. And of course Southern states frequently were sharply at odds with the federal government during the civil rights era.

By contesting federal intervention, states shaped various national policies during the twentieth century, from resisting unemployment-insurance reform in the 1940s (Karch and Rose 2017) to pushing for welfare reform in the 1990s (Bulman-Pozen and Gerken 2009). Uncooperative federalism is possible, in part, due to the limits of federal regulatory capacity, which puts the states in a position of power. “When Congress makes a law, it often lacks the resources to enforce it. Instead, it relies on states and localities to carry out its policies….This means that states can shape policy simply by refusing to partner with the federal government” (Gerken and Revesz 2017). Moreover, as the number of federal–state policies expanded, so has the states’ administrative role, augmenting their resources, expertise, and capacity for resistance.

Although intergovernmental relations have long been contentious, both the number and the intensity of conflicts have escalated in recent years, as state officials began to resist federal policy intervention with mounting force (Gamkhar and Pickerill 2012). This trend can be traced to the rise of partisan polarization and, with it, “partisan federalism”—that is, “political actors’ use of state and federal governments in ways that articulate, stage, and amplify competition between the political parties” (Bulman-Pozen 2014). With the GOP controlling a majority of state governments, resistance largely reflects the efforts of a few blue states.2