Democrats reverse state rights stance amid Trump’s National Guard threats

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson spent weeks criticizing the president Donald TrumpThreats to deploy National Guard troops to the city — a stance that some Republicans call a stark reversal from the Democratic Party’s longstanding opposition to “states’ rights” arguments.

Although the legality of Trump’s actions remains to be tested – his federalization efforts are being reviewed this week by several federal and appeals courts – the decision has sparked a fierce cross-party debate. Democrats, for their part, denounced the move as illegal and beyond Trump’s authority.

“The president has declared war on the poor,” Johnson said at a news conference, in response to Trump’s plan to send National Guard troops to Chicago. His comments follow a series of warnings from Democratic governors and mayors who say federalizing Guard units is both unnecessary and an illegal intrusion into local authority.

Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators say Democrats are contradicting their past stance on state sovereignty. “The Democrats were out of touch with reality when they said they didn’t need help from President Trump; everything is fine in Chicago,” Gianno Caldwell, a Chicago native and founder of the Caldwell Institute of Public Safety, told Fox News Digital.

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Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker speak during a news conference in Chicago on August 25, 2025. (AFP via Getty Images)

“When you look at the numbers, you look at crime, 75 percent of the murders in Chicago are unsolved. Seventy-five percent — it’s a serious problem, a systemic problem that Chicagoans face every day,” Caldwell said.

Caldwell also highlighted a clash that occurred in 2012 over the Obama administration’s Secure Communities programwhich required local police to share fingerprint data with federal immigration officials. Republicans at the time accused Obama of hypocrisy in suing Arizona over harsh immigration enforcement while failing to take action against Democratic-led Chicago and Cook County, which sought to limit cooperation with federal authorities.

But others disagree, particularly over allegations of hypocrisy. “However you want to characterize it,” accusations of hypocrisy “are a symptom of the poverty of our current political debate,” George Derek Musgrove, a history professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said in an interview with Fox News Digital.

“Many liberal, not conservative, Democrats in the 1960s, 1950s and before that were critical of states’ rights because segregationists used the principle of federalism or states’ rights as a sort of ‘watchword’ to protect segregation,” Musgrove said.

“Today the president is moving away from the idea of ​​states’ rights because he wants to punish Democratic cities,” Musgrove said.

Trump, for his part, called the actions necessary to crack down on violent crime and to help implement his administration’s policy priorities, including immigration control.

But Democratic mayors, including Johnson, rejected the idea that their cities would be plagued by violence necessary to justify a military response. Johnson highlighted the progress Chicago has made in reducing violent crime. (Chicago homicides have fallen 28% so far in 2025 compared to the same point last year, according to data of the city’s police department, and down about 50% from 2020, when violent crime in many major U.S. cities peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Ultimately, Musgrove told Fox News Digital, the “hypocrisy” question is too simplistic and fails to capture the broader context, principles and policies at play in any given political moment.

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Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, October 7, 2025. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo)

“It obscures what we’re actually talking about. It takes us away from the question of whether what the president is doing is legal or not,” he said.

“And it sort of moves into this question of hypocrisy, rather than first dealing with whether this is a legal question that can be decided by a court, based on legal principles.”

To this end, more clarity should be provided soon. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to consider Trump’s ability to deploy troops to Oregon on Thursday — and regardless of how it rules, the case is widely expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court.

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Federal law enforcement officers arrive near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Broadview, Illinois, October 3, 2025. (Erin Hooley/AP Photo)

Trump also has the option to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that gives the president additional powers during a national emergency.

Invoking this law would bring to the fore a whole host of new legal considerations, and Trump has suggested he would invoke the law if necessary as recently as this week.

“If I had to implement it, I would,” Trump told reporters Monday. “If people were killed and the courts held us back, or the governors or mayors held us back.”

Democratic leaders also pledged to take their own steps to combat what they say is Trump’s illegal overreach. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Monday threatened to withdraw their states from the National Governors’ Association if the group did not condemn Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops from other states to their jurisdictions.

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Asked by reporters Tuesday about the troop deployment, Trump defended his decision by saying simply: “If you look at Chicago, Chicago is a big city where there’s a lot of crime.”

“And if the governor can’t do his job, we will,” he added.