The compound republic and its necessary tensions

The New York Times reports that the Trump administration has publicly condemned eighteen states as 'sanctuary' jurisdictions — and that a review of those same states found all of them cooperating significantly with federal immigration authorities when violent crimes are involved. That single finding repays careful structural attention, because it reveals not hypocrisy alone but a constitutional dynamic as old as the compact itself.

The framers built what I would call a compound republic: two orders of government, each drawing authority from the people directly, each sovereign within its assigned sphere. The states were not to be mere administrative districts of the federal executive; nor were they to be independent confederacies that could ignore national law at will. The balance was the design — not an accident to be corrected, but the mechanism by which liberty was to be secured.

Here is the structural question the Times story raises: if the federal executive cannot carry out its own enforcement without substantial state and local cooperation, then the executive's power is, in practice, less than its formal authority suggests. That is not a failure of design; it is the design working. The anti-commandeering doctrine — which, by inference from the history of the Tenth Amendment, I regard as well-grounded — holds that Congress may not conscript state officers into federal service. The executive enjoys no greater power on this point than the legislature.

Yet the administration's public rhetoric treats the states as subordinate instrumentalities that must obey or be punished. That posture, whatever its political utility, distorts the constitutional relationship. A government that loudly accuses eighteen states of defiance while quietly depending on their cooperation is not enforcing a compact; it is performing one. The performance may serve factional purposes — and here Federalist No. 10 is worth recalling: factions use the machinery of government to advance their particular interest against the common good — but it does not clarify who holds authority or on what terms.

The deeper question is accountability. If enforcement is a shared enterprise between federal and state actors, the public deserves to know, clearly and honestly, which level of government is responsible for which decision. Obscuring that line by branding cooperative states as hostile serves neither the rule of law nor the citizen who must live under it. Representation, I argued at the convention and after, requires that the governed be able to trace authority back to an accountable source. Deliberate confusion of that trace is an injury to republican government itself.

I offer no opinion on the policy of immigration enforcement as such — that is a legislative question, properly resolved by Congress under Article I, Section 8, not by executive proclamation. What I do insist upon is this: the executive must be honest about the limits of its own reach, the states must be honest about the cooperation they do extend, and the public must hold both to account. The compound republic survives only when neither order of government can successfully deceive the other — or the people — about where power actually resides.