{"id":70709,"date":"2017-04-20T09:39:49","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T15:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/montana-uses-gun-laws-to-defend-sanctuary-cities-against-trump\/"},"modified":"2017-04-20T15:39:49","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T15:39:49","slug":"montana-uses-gun-laws-to-defend-sanctuary-cities-against-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/montana-uses-gun-laws-to-defend-sanctuary-cities-against-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana uses gun laws to defend sanctuary cities against Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Protesters
Protesters gather outside of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Washington, D.C.<\/span>Joe Brusky\/Flickr<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

San Francisco is suing over President Donald Trump\u2019s executive order against \u201csanctuary cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The order, signed in January, defined \u201csanctuary jurisdictions\u201d as any that \u201cattempt to shield aliens from removal from the United States.\u201d It lists several actions the federal government may take, including denial of federal funds and other \u201cappropriate enforcement action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Attorney General Jeff Sessions repeated the threat in March.<\/p>\n

According to San Francisco\u2019s lawsuit, the order \u201ccommandeers state and local governments in violation of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.\u201d In other words, the federal government intends to enlist the help of the 765,000 or so law enforcement officers who work for state and local governments to enforce federal immigration laws.<\/p>\n

This is cheaper for the federal government than hiring more agents, but it is costly to unwilling state and local governments. That\u2019s the \u201ccommandeering\u201d problem at the heart of this legal challenge.<\/p>\n

San Francisco\u2019s challenge to Trump\u2019s immigration policies draws on an unlikely precedent: a Montana sheriff\u2019s challenge to federal gun control policy. More cities are considering similar challenges.<\/p>\n

The city of Seattle has filed suit. In my work on constitutional law, I study how principles of federalism established by deep red rural counties against a liberal national policy agenda are now serving deep blue urban cities resisting a conservative national policy agenda.<\/p>\n

Reconciling red and blue<\/div>\n

In these legal challenges, red and blue states agree on at least one thing \u2013 the federal government\u2019s powers are limited under the Constitution. This principle might save what some commentators have called a \u201cbad marriage\u201d between increasingly polarized red and blue states.<\/p>\n

Our federal system of government allows diverse state policy agendas. Under federalism, state and local dissenters retain some power to govern themselves. This can help soften the blow of national political victories for losing parties.<\/p>\n

San Francisco\u2019s case against Trump cites a lawsuit filed in rural Ravalli County, Montana, in the first year of President Bill Clinton\u2019s term. Clinton lost the county in a landslide, though not as badly as Trump lost San Francisco. In his first term, Clinton signed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993, or the \u201cBrady Bill.\u201d<\/p>\n

The law requires background checks for handgun purchases. The law required local law enforcement officers to run the background checks until the federal system was up and running.<\/p>\n

That did not sit well with Jay Printz, an old-school Montana sheriff who eventually would join the National Rifle Association\u2019s board of directors.<\/p>\n

The Brady Bill\u2019s mandate conflicted with Montana law, which prohibited Printz from regulating firearm purchases.<\/p>\n

So, he sued. He took his case all the way to the Supreme Court and won. In a 5-4 opinion authored by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the court held that the \u201cFederal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States\u2019 officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.\u201d<\/p>\n

It relied on the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states: \u201cThe powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The justices interpreted the Constitution as reserving control over state officials to the states alone.<\/p>\n

The ruling prohibited federal commandeering of state officials like Sheriff Printz by enlisting them to enforce federal law.<\/p>\n

It also meant that as long as the federal government is not coercive, making an offer the states can\u2019t refuse, it can persuade them with the promise of federal funding.<\/p>\n

For example, in 1987, South Dakota challenged the federal government\u2019s withholding of a small share of highway funding if the state did not raise its drinking age to 21.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court allowed the spending condition as a \u201crelatively mild encouragement\u201d to follow federal policy. Yet, it warned that at some point, \u201cpressure turns into compulsion.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court found the government reached that point in 2012, when it struck down the Affordable Care Act\u2019s expansion of Medicaid. Under the act, holdout states were faced with losing around 10 percent of their total budgets if they refused to accept the Medicaid expansion.<\/p>\n

In the Affordable Care Act case, the court extended the reasoning of the Printz case to federal spending programs.<\/p>\n

In a metaphor Sheriff Printz might appreciate, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the threat of losing so much federal funding was \u201ca gun to the head.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was as good as commandeering the states themselves.<\/p>\n

Two of the more liberal justices joined Chief Justice Roberts and the four more conservative justices in a 7-2 decision on the issue.<\/p>\n

A sanctuary county?<\/div>\n

San Francisco now argues that if the Brady Bill\u2019s requirement that Printz conduct background checks is unconstitutional, then Trump\u2019s sanctuary city policy is too.<\/p>\n

Making federal funds conditional on compliance with federal immigration enforcement, San Francisco argues, would be \u201ca gun to the head.\u201d<\/p>\n

Federalism allows for people in the states to reach local compromises that cannot be reached at the national level in the current political climate.<\/p>\n

Other state and local governments may seek sanctuary from federal drug laws, for example. The anti-commandeering rule lets people in the states resist some federal mandates, or even the threatened loss of federal funds.<\/p>\n

Today, a conservative administration in Washington is ruling over a center-left plurality in the states. One consequence is the appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices, who typically support states\u2019 federalism arguments.<\/p>\n

Given these shifts, we can expect more liberal jurisdictions to find common ground with Sheriff Printz\u2019s resistance in years to come.<\/p>\n

Anthony Johnstone is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Montana. This article originally appeared at The Conversation.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A gun law arms opponents of Trump\u2019s immigration policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70710,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[120,904,315,5583],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-70709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-colorado","tag-immigration","tag-president-donald-trump","tag-refugee"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70709"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=70709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}