Within days of President Trump’s executive order to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities, San Francisco had filed a lawsuit opposing the order [to block federal funding for them]….
We also have this regarding…coercion…by the Federal government.
Last year, a federal judge in Illinois ruled that it was unconstitutional for the Department of Homeland Security to force local jails to detain suspected undocumented immigrants without a warrant. And in a 1997 Supreme Court decision, Printz v US, a 5-4 majority held that the federal government “may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”
OK. And with our republican form of democracy, articulated most clearly in our 9th and 10th Amendments, those probably aren’t bad court rulings.
However, if things like Printz v US or South Dakota v Dole [another Supreme Court coercion case] really are going to be players in this, it’s a game easily settled: stop sending Federal dollars—taxpayer dollars—to all cities altogether. The cities have no inherent right to Federal money, and the cessation of that particular spending would be good for the Federal budget in its own right.