Democrats reverse states rights stance in face of Trump National Guard threats

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has spent weeks criticizing the president Donald TrumpUS threats to deploy National Guard troops to the city – a position that some Republicans have described as a sharp reversal of the Democratic Party’s long-standing opposition to “states’ rights” arguments.

While the legality of Trump’s actions remains to be seen — his federal efforts are being reviewed by several federal and appeals courts this week — the move has sparked intense debate across partisan lines. For their part, Democrats denounced this move, describing it as illegal and outside the scope of Trump’s authority.

Johnson said during a press conference in response to Trump’s plan: “The president has declared war on the poor.” Send National Guard troops To Chicago. His comments followed a series of warnings from Democratic governors and mayors who argued that federalizing Guard units was unnecessary and an unlawful interference with local authority.

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

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Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J.B. 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 the crime, 75 percent of the homicides committed in Chicago are unsolved. Seventy-five percent — that’s a serious issue, and it’s a systemic issue that Chicagoans deal with on a daily basis.”

Caldwell also noted that the 2012 conflict was over Obama Administration’s Secure Communities Programwhich required local police to share fingerprint data with federal immigration agents. Republicans at the time accused Obama of hypocrisy because he sued Arizona over tough immigration enforcement while taking no action against Democratic-led Chicago and Cook County, which sought to limit cooperation with federal authorities.

But others disagree, especially regarding allegations of hypocrisy. “However you want to put 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, told Fox News Digital in an interview.

“A lot of liberal Democrats, not conservative Democrats, in the 1960s and 1950s, and before that, were critical of states’ rights because segregationists were using federalism or states’ rights as a kind of ‘slogan’ 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.

For his part, Trump described these measures as necessary to eliminate violent crimes and to help implement his administration’s policy priorities, including immigration enforcement.

But Democratic mayors, including Johnson, have rejected the idea that their cities are in the throes of violence necessary to justify a military response. Johnson emphasized the progress Chicago has made in reducing violent crime. (Chicago homicides are down 28% so far in 2025 compared to the same point last year, according to Data From the city’s police department, and was down nearly 50% compared to 2020, when violent crime in several major U.S. cities peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

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

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

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

“This is kind of turning to the issue of hypocrisy, instead of first dealing with the truth [of whether] “This is a legal matter that can be decided in a court of law, on the basis of legal principles.”

To this end, more clarity is expected soon. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to review Trump’s ability to deploy troops in Oregon on Thursday — and regardless of how it rules, the order 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 facility in Broadview, Illinois, on October 3, 2025. (Erin Holley/AP Photo)

Trump also has the ability to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that gives the president additional powers in the event of a national emergency.

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

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

Democratic leaders also pledged to take action of their own to combat what they described as Trump’s illegal transgressions. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker both threatened Monday to withdraw their states from the National Governors Association if the group fails to condemn Trump’s deployment of other states’ National Guard troops to their jurisdictions.

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Asked by reporters on Tuesday about deploying troops, Trump defended his decision, saying only: “If you look at Chicago, Chicago is a great city with a lot of crime.”

He added: “And if the governor cannot do this job, we will do it.”