The constitutional crisis that’s been building at the southern border reached a sharp point on Wednesday when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott asserted his state’s right to defend itself against invasion, arguing the Biden administration has “broken the compact between the United States and the States.”
It’s not an overstatement to say this is the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War and that we’re in uncharted waters now. There have been times in our history when a state has defied the enforcement of federal laws, but we’ve never faced a situation where the federal government has refused to enforce its laws and even violated them. And because the border crisis involves the question of security, Abbott’s assertion of state authority cuts right to the heart of the question at hand, which is one of first principles: Does a polity have the right to defend itself, to preserve its existence in the face of invasion?
The answer is, of course, yes. The preservation of the polity must come before process arguments about whose job it is to enforce federal immigration laws. The state of Texas, in this case, has an authority that transcends that of President Biden and the Supreme Court. That’s precisely why the U.S. Constitution includes a clause explicitly recognizing a state’s right to act in self-defense when faced with invasion.
It shouldn’t have come to this, but Biden has not only refused to enforce federal immigration laws, his administration has been blatantly violating them for three years, triggering the worst
