Lifelong states' rights defender Greg Abbott has now changed his mind

Just last year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott joined a bipartisan chorus of governors in denouncing a Biden administration plan they said would strip states of powers guaranteed to them under federal law.

The plan would have transferred Air National Guard units from six states to the U.S. Space Force, the newly created military branch, stoking concerns about federal overreach and the erosion of governors’ control over their own guard forces. Texas wasn’t among the affected states, but Abbott made his opposition unmistakable in an open letter to the president.

He called the plan an “intolerable threat that would set a “dangerous precedent.”

“I strongly oppose any attempt to sideline governors when it comes to their respective National Guards,” he wrote.

A year later, Abbott helped Donald Trump do just that. He said that he “fully authorized” the president’s plan to send Texas National Guard members to Illinois and Oregon to protect federal law enforcement personnel who are executing immigration laws. Those states’ governors vigorously objected, saying such action was an unnecessary escalation that interfered with state sovereignty.

Abbott defended the deployment on Fox News. The president, he said, has the authority to mobilize guard members to preserve public safety.

“President Trump and I have a good, longstanding working relationship, and there is a substantive reason behind that,” Abbott said. He added that he and the president were “operating very closely aligned on ensuring that our country is going to be safe.”

Abbott, the leader of the largest state led by Republicans, has emerged as one of Trump’s most important allies as the president tests the limits of executive power. While governors often align with their parties’ presidents, Abbott’s support for Trump’s expansion of federal powers is a striking departure from his own historical and ardent defenses of state sovereignty.

That, constitutional experts say, sets a risky example that may be difficult to reverse.

“What he’s doing is short-term gain for his political positions, and Texas’ political positions, but not for Texas as a state moving forward,” said Georgetown University Law Center professor Victoria Nourse. “You might like this president, but you’re not necessarily going to like what happens to Texas with the next one.”

There are myriad examples of Abbott bending his views on state sovereignty to accede to the wishes of the new administration, including directing state agencies to assist the administration’s immigration enforcement — an action that constitutional law experts said essentially deputized the Texas government into federal service — as well as providing data on voters and redrawing legislative boundaries to net more GOP-friendly seats in the U.S. House.

Abbott’s arguments then and actions now are an example of what Jessica Bulman-Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University, calls partisan federalism, a term describing how state leaders’ fervor for defending their sovereignty increasingly depends on whether their party is in power in Washington. She said Abbott’s support of the guard deployments is particularly alarming because it diminishes the traditional power of governors to manage law enforcement in their states.

Abbott did not respond to interview requests or written questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. But Robert Henneke, general counsel for the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, and James Peinado, chair of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Texas, which advocates for limited government, said they saw no contradiction between Abbott’s historic defense of states’ authority and his support of Trump’s actions. Trump is following the law, Henneke said, and “the states don’t have the power to block the lawful exercise of authority of the federal government.”

Abbott’s actions, however, have drawn rebuke from fellow governors, including at least one from his own party.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, told The New York Times that he was surprised Abbott sent Texas guard members to Illinois. “We believe in the federalist system — that’s states’ rights. Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration,” said Stitt, who did not respond to interview requests.

Ron Beal, a retired law professor at Baylor University, said Abbott’s actions not only violate the historic spirit of cooperation among states, but provide Trump cover to unlawfully interfere in state matters.

“Trump’s reason for sending troops is clearly a total fabrication of reality and I believe a constitutional violation,” Beal said. “It is simply outrageous that Abbott would participate and cooperate with such activity.”

Shifting View of Federal Power

Abbott’s devotion to state sovereignty has long been central to his political identity.

In January 2016, entering his second year as governor, he published a 92-page essay defending states’ rights and decrying what he called the Obama administration’s executive overreach. In a speech that month to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, he accused President Barack Obama of bypassing Congress by enacting climate change and immigration policy through unilateral executive orders. Abbott also lambasted the Supreme Court for upholding the Affordable Care Act, arguing the justices invented a legal basis for it.

“State leaders were supposed to have the power and opportunity to check any attempt by federal officials to overstep their bounds,” Abbott wrote. “Indeed, the entire structure of the Constitution was premised on the idea that the states would be stronger than the national government.”

Abbott proposed the “Texas Plan,” a set of nine constitutional amendments that he said would restore the balance of authority between the federal government and states. Among them was one that would make clear that the president, Congress and judges have no powers beyond those expressly mentioned in the Constitution.

The essay offered a well-reasoned critique of growing federal power, said Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, who has assigned it as required reading for his students.

Levinson said Abbott’s recent actions mark a complete reversal.

“He condemned presidents for overreach, particularly in executive orders, and said we had to do something to rein that in. There’s much to be said for that, but that is certainly not his view in 2025,” Levinson said. “Most of what Trump does is through executive order.”

Trump has sought to use executive orders to force changes to elections and voting. He has also pressured state leaders to make changes on his behalf, and Abbott has obliged.

Over the summer, Abbott became the first governor to comply with Trump’s demand that Republican-led states break from the traditional 10-year cycle of redrawing congressional districts to create more GOP-friendly seats for the 2026 midterm election.

Initially sympathetic to incumbent Republican House members’ worries that the strategy could weaken solid GOP seats by spreading the party’s voters across too many districts, Abbott ultimately called a special session of the Texas Legislature to draft new congressional boundaries.

Texas lawmakers in 2003 similarly conducted a rare mid-decade redistricting, but that was not directed by then-President George W. Bush, said Karl Rove, one of Bush’s senior advisers. “The White House and RNC didn’t provoke or lead the effort,” Rove said in a text message.

A governor allowing a president to influence when a state redistricts cedes the historical power of states to run their own elections, said Mimi Marziani, who teaches election law at the University of Texas.

She said Trump’s request for more GOP-friendly seats “has everything to do with national party interests and nothing to do with state interests.” And she warned that if governors give in, they will be vulnerable to future presidential meddling.

Earlier this month, Trump endorsed Abbott for reelection, citing redistricting as one of the governor’s key accomplishments. A week later, a panel of three federal judges blocked the state’s newly drawn congressional map from taking effect, finding that it discriminated against voters based on race. On Tuesday, Abbott said Texas would “swiftly appeal” to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Abbott’s cooperation has extended to sharing voter registration data with Washington.

Texas joined more than a dozen states in turning over voter roll information to the Justice Department, despite long-standing resistance to federal oversight of state elections.

The Constitution allows states to run elections, subject to oversight by Congress. But Trump sought greater control over the process, issuing an executive order in March that prioritized enforcing the federal laws that bar noncitizens from voting.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that noncitizens are voting en masse to sway U.S. elections in favor of Democrats, while research has shown this not to be true.

A recent voter roll audit by the Texas secretary of state, using a federal citizenship database, flagged 2,724 voters — or 0.015% — as potential noncitizens. Preliminary investigations by county voter registrars, however, found that some of those voters are citizens.

Acting on Trump’s order, the Justice Department requested from states their entire voter rolls, including dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, according to a letter sent to Texas and obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune under public records laws.

Records show that Texas provided voter roll information to the Justice Department in October.

Texas secretary of state spokesperson Alicia Pierce told ProPublica and the Tribune that the secretary of state provided only the publicly available version of its voter roll, which redacts information such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

The Justice Department is suing eight states, six of which had provided or offered publicly available versions of their voter rolls because they did not include all the information the federal government sought. One such state is Pennsylvania.

“This request, and reported efforts to collect broad data on millions of Americans, represent a concerning attempt to expand the federal government’s role in our country’s electoral process,” Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, wrote to the Justice Department in August.

Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre declined to comment on why the federal government had not included Texas among the states it was suing for failing to share all the information the government sought.

But the same month that Texas quietly handed over the limited voter roll, Secretary of State Jane Nelson, an Abbott appointee, announced her office had finished running the full roll, along with Social Security numbers, through a federal database to check voters’ citizenship status.

The Department of Homeland Security stores voter data uploaded by state officials, DHS records obtained by ProPublica found.

Nelson’s office did not answer questions about whether doing so essentially provided the federal government with even more data on Texas voters than it had initially sought.

In Limbo

Abbott embraced Trump’s deployment of Texas National Guard troops under a novel interpretation of a federal law that authorizes the mobilization of troops to quell a rebellion or threat of rebellion, or if “regular forces” are unable to enforce federal law. No modern president has invoked the law to assist in carrying out immigration policy.

Despite Abbott’s support, the 400 Texas National Guard troops mobilized by Trump are still not on the streets of Illinois or Oregon.

Federal judges temporarily halted the deployments after Oregon and Illinois sued the Trump administration, arguing that its actions violate the 10th Amendment, which gives the states all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitution.

The states’ arguments echo those Abbott made in his 2016 essay, in which he warned that Washington too often ignored that amendment to impose its will on states. He proposed making it easier for states to sue the federal government over alleged abuses of power.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is handling the Illinois case, had a similar take. In an Oct. 16 ruling, the court said the Texas troop mobilization was “an incursion on Illinois’s sovereignty” and likely a violation of the 10th Amendment.

The litigation kept Texas Guard members who were deployed to the Chicago area more than a month ago in limbo, unable to carry out what Trump wanted them to but unable to leave. A U.S. Defense Department spokesperson said the 200 guard members who were training at a base in Illinois returned to Texas last week. The rest, bound for Oregon, remain at Fort Bliss in El Paso.

The U.S. Supreme Court has placed the Illinois case on its emergency docket and is considering the parties’ written arguments. The court’s pending ruling would likely apply to the Oregon case as well.

Despite the uncertainty regarding the deployment’s legality, Trump suggested in an October speech to U.S. military members that he was prepared to send troops, including active-duty units, into more cities.

Abbott’s cooperation thus far will make it harder for other states to resist Trump in future deployments, said James Gardner, a constitutional law professor at the University at Buffalo. The framers of the Constitution intended for states to stand with one another to ensure officials in Washington never accumulated too much power, Gardner said.

He said that while Abbott, who is seeking a record fourth term next year, would likely rediscover his passion for states’ rights if a Democrat were elected president, the governor may struggle to regain power he helped take away from the states.

“By altering the Constitution’s contemplated balance of power, it makes it easier for the central government to crush dissenting states,” Gardner said.