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Hello, Bulwark readers! I’ve been staying on top of Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which Senate Republicans seem determined to move through their chamber as quickly as their House counterparts did. But like a lot of you, I’ve also been following all the news from California. Then I realized there’s a common thread, one that tells us a lot about the direction Trump and his allies want to take us. It’s the subject of today’s newsletter. Thanks for reading and feel free to share!
— Jonathan
How Trump Killed The GOP’s Love of States’ Rights
From immigration to education to Medicaid, the new strategy is to impose a MAGA vision on America—whether or not states like it.
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DONALD TRUMP SURE DOES love to hate California.
Since taking office, he has blocked the state’s tight vehicle emission standards from taking effect, attacked its public schools over trans athletes and “DEI” issues, repeatedly threatened to withhold disaster relief after the devastating forest fires, and tried to yank federal financing from if California doesn’t do more to enforce his immigration agenda.¹
All of that is on top of commandeering the state’s National Guard—and calling in the Marines—to quell protests against the immigration crackdown.
Of course, beating up on California is nothing new for Trump, or for his allies. The state has been a conservative bête noire for decades, thanks to its leading role in causes like same-sex marriage and environmental protection. Today its embrace of immigrants and ties to Hollywood liberalism make it a symbol for everything the MAGA movement believes is wrong with America—a place to be denigrated and punished with rhetoric and, increasingly, with policy.
But the attacks on California have become so familiar it’s easy to miss that they are a sign of a broader shift away from what has been a bedrock GOP principle: states’ rights.
This is no small thing. The danger of federal overreach has been a staple of Republican rhetoric for most of the modern political era, deployed in order to block everything from the landmark civil rights efforts of the 1950s and ’60s to the environmental and consumer-protection laws of the ’70s and ’80s. More recently, warnings about too much federal power figured prominently in arguments Republicans made against the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, which they said imposed a national solution for health care on states that didn’t want it.²
You can still hear versions of those arguments, especially in courtrooms when red states challenge older federal regulations put in place by Democratic administrations. But these days you’re more likely to find Trump and MAGA Republicans on the other side of the federalism divide.
Instead of trying to curb the power of Washington, they’re deploying it so they can impose their governing vision on recalcitrant states—through the kind of actions Trump has been taking against California and, they hope, through the legislation they are now trying to get through Congress.
THAT LEGISLATION IS THE One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the House passed in May and the Senate is debating.
The biggest spending cuts in the bill are to Medicaid. And the biggest chunk of the Medicaid cuts are from new “work requirements” under which enrollees could not qualify for the program unless they demonstrated that they have a job, are engaged in another qualifying activity (like community service) or have a valid reason for not seeking work (like caregiving responsibility for a young child).
Medicaid is a joint federal-state program: Washington provides the majority of funding and sets parameters for how it should work, then leaves administration to the states, which have to kick in the rest of the funds. The arrangement has always given states some flexibility, including through waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services that states can seek if they can demonstrate what they want to do with Medicaid is consistent with the program’s overall goals.
Republican state officials from more conservative parts of the country have for years sought to introduce work requirements, only to be stymied by HHS officials or federal judges who said conditioning Medicaid on work was not in keeping with the program’s goals of expanding access to health care. The legislation Trump and congressional Republicans want to pass would effectively remove that obstacle.
But the new legislation wouldn’t simply allow states to impose work requirements. It would require them to do so. And it wouldn’t leave states much discretion over how to do it. The legislation stipulates that states must take into account work status for at least the previous month, and verify eligibility at least every six months.
The only real leeway states have would be if they chose to limit enrollment even more aggressively by taking into account work history for longer than a month.