'Now Trump’s in charge': Why Republicans killed GOP’s love of states’ rights

25 June

U.S. President Donald Trump attends a meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NAC) during a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025. REUTERS/Toby Melville

Bulwark journalist and author Jonathan Cohn reports that Republicans passionately embraced the battle against federal overreach for most of the modern political era, but President Donald Trump finally changed all that.

Party conservatives, he says, used arguments against overreach “to block everything from the landmark civil rights efforts of the 1950s and ’60s to the environmental and consumer-protection laws of the ’70s and ’80s.”

More recently, House and Senate Republicans used the war cry against “too much federal power” in legal arguments against the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, “which they said imposed a national solution for health care on states that didn’t want it.”

But that was before Trump blocked California’s vehicle emission standards from taking effect, and attacked its public schools over trans athletes and “DEI” issues. Cohn points out the president also repeatedly threatened to withhold disaster relief from California after devastating forest fires wrecked the state, and he tried to pull federal financing if the state refused to join him in his war on immigration. Not to mention “commandeering the state’s National Guard—and calling in the Marines—to quell protests against his immigration crackdown.”

Cohn says Republicans’ surrender on federal overreach is also plain in their support for Trump’s budget proposal being debated in Congress this week, which requires states to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries under federal command. And it picks and chooses what medical procedures can be covered without state input.

“Conservatives have long espoused states’ rights, but with Medicaid, Republicans are now seeking to impose a more limited version of health coverage on states,” Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation Executive Vice President Larry Levitt tells Cohn.

In addition to all that, Cohn says the Trump budget would demand states create new data systems and hire new people to manage the new verification process, costing more than the $100 million the legislation would award states to help defray the expense.

“Not so long ago, congressional Republicans would decry this sort of command as an ‘unfunded mandate’—a wild abuse of power by Washington over the will of the states,” Cohn said, echoing years of criticism from Republicans about Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

“But that was then. Now, Trump’s in charge,” say Cohn.

Read the full Bulwark report at this link.

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