Could the US Adopt the European Union’s Model Using Existing Constitutional Law?

The federal government has been captured by an authoritarian movement. Republicans control all three branches, and they’re all complicit.

The president tried to overturn an election, now runs a private army that abducts residents, and treats court orders as optional. Congressional Republicans enable it. The Supreme Court clears the path.

Blue states are scrambling to protect their residents using every constitutional mechanism available. But here’s the thing: those mechanisms exist because the founders built a system where states don’t have to rely on federal permission.

The tools being used right now for emergency resistance could become something more permanent.

The European Union figured out a model where 27 countries share a currency and coordinate defense while each handles its own domestic policy. Certain decisions require consensus. Member states can’t be steamrolled.

Some version of that could make American federal elections feel less like existential cage matches. We’re already moving in that direction. This article explores what’s being built and what it would take to do it on purpose.

Nineteen red states have passed resolutions calling for a constitutional convention to limit federal power. Seventeen blue states plus DC have signed a compact to effectively abolish the Electoral College.

Utah passed a law letting the state legislature vote to defy federal rules with supermajorities in both chambers. Texas invoked compact theory to defy federal border authority, and 26 Republican governors backed them. Twenty-four states have legalized recreational cannabis in open defiance of federal law.

The American right claims it’s defending constitutional originalism while backing a president who tried to overturn an election and now runs a private army that abducts residents, violates the First, Fourth, and Tenth Amendments daily, and treats court orders as suggestions.

The American left is resisting authoritarian capture of federal institutions. These aren’t equivalent positions.

But both are using the same mechanisms toward the same destination: a decentralized union where states run their own affairs, federal power is constrained by consensus requirements, and the presidency becomes less consequential to daily life.

They’re building confederation.

The numbers are further along than they appear.

The Convention of States movement needs 34 state legislatures to trigger an Article V constitutional convention. They have 19. That’s 56% of the way to a mechanism that hasn’t been used since the founders wrote the document.

Their stated goals include imposing fiscal restraints on the federal government, limiting federal jurisdiction, and establishing term limits. But once a convention is called, the scope of what it can propose is genuinely unsettled law. Some scholars believe it could propose anything, including wholesale restructuring of federal-state relations.

On the other side, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has 209 of the 270 electoral votes needed to take effect. When it hits that threshold, member states will award their electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote, regardless of how their own state voted.

It’s a workaround that doesn’t require amending the Constitution, and it would fundamentally change how presidents are elected. Every state that has signed it is blue. But the underlying logic, that states can coordinate to reshape federal outcomes without federal permission, is the same logic driving the Convention of States.

Both movements are using powers the founders built into the system.

Article V gives states the ability to amend the Constitution without Congress proposing the amendments. The Compact Clause lets states enter binding agreements with each other. The Tenth Amendment reserves powers not delegated to the federal government.

Anti-commandeering doctrine, repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court, means the federal government cannot force states to enforce federal law. The founders built these as load-bearing walls of the original design.

The resistance infrastructure being built looks increasingly like the European Union.

The EU has 27 member nations that share a currency, coordinate military decisions, and maintain open borders, while each nation handles its own domestic policy. Certain decisions require unanimous consent of all members.

The principle of subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the lowest level capable of handling them. The EU is a union of countries that have chosen to pool sovereignty in specific domains while retaining autonomy in others.

American interstate compacts already function this way.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative covers eleven states running a shared cap-and-trade carbon market with its own administrative agency. The Nurse Licensure Compact lets registered nurses practice across 43 states with a single license. The Interstate Medical Licensure Compact does the same for physicians in 36 states.

These are quasi-governmental structures with binding regulatory authority, and they work.

Look at the tools they’re using.

Conservatives pass Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions. Progressives pass immigration sanctuary policies. Both rely on anti-commandeering: the state simply refuses to help enforce federal law.

Conservatives push Firearms Freedom Acts claiming state-made guns are beyond federal jurisdiction. Progressives push cannabis legalization claiming the same. Both are assertions that federal power has limits, that states can define zones of autonomy, that the federal government’s writ doesn’t run everywhere.

Utah’s Constitutional Sovereignty Act, signed in 2024, creates a formal process for the state legislature to challenge federal actions. It passed the state House 57-14 and the Senate 24-5. A supermajority of Utah lawmakers, across party lines, decided they want a mechanism to resist federal overreach.

The first target was an EPA rule. The next target could be anything.

When Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state forces to defy federal border authority in January 2024, he invoked language that legal scholars compared to pre-Civil War secessionist rhetoric. But 26 Republican governors signed a letter supporting him.

That’s a majority of states with Republican leadership saying, in effect, that the federal government can be defied when states believe it has failed its obligations. The precedent isn’t partisan. The principle will be used by whoever is out of power federally.

Imagine if we did this in a coordinated fashion.

Democratic state legislators nationwide proposing a constant stream of bills to increase state power and decrease fascist federal power. Pass all your dream laws. Overwhelm the Supreme Court. They want to take their billionaire yacht vacations, so don’t expect them to stay late at the office.

This is how we win.

Right now, authoritarians use state power to entrench minority rule while people who believe in human rights and democracy build infrastructure to protect freedom.

But the destination is the same: an America where federal elections matter less because federal power reaches less, where states and interstate compacts handle more of what affects daily life, where the presidency stops being an existential knife fight because the knife isn’t as sharp.

The European Union didn’t emerge from countries that loved each other. France and Germany fought three catastrophic wars in 70 years before they decided to pool coal and steel production.

The EU exists because nations that couldn’t stop killing each other decided that economic integration and shared governance structures were preferable to the alternative. They didn’t merge into one country. They built something new: a union where cooperation is formalized, exit is possible, and sovereignty is layered rather than absolute.

America is conducting the same experiment by accident.

The founders understood that the country was too large and too diverse for pure centralization. They built a federal system with genuine reserved powers for states.

Over two centuries, federal power expanded dramatically, particularly after the New Deal and the civil rights era. The expansion had reasons. National problems seemed to require national solutions.

But it also raised the stakes of every federal election to unbearable levels. When the federal government controls everything, winning it becomes the only thing that matters.

The current moment is unsustainable.

Forty percent of the country supports a president the other sixty percent considers an existential threat. Congress is weaponized. The Supreme Court is a tool of oligarchs who realized they could trick enough people and buy enough others to capture the federal government and use it for tyranny.

Every four years, Americans experience collective trauma as they wait to find out if their side won the only election that matters. This is not a system designed for psychological survival.

Confederation offers a different model.

Imagine an America where blue states aren’t fighting the federal government to forgive student loan debt, provide universal healthcare, offer free college, and protect abortion rights. Where they can coordinate with each other, fund themselves, and pass the laws their residents actually want.

Where interstate compacts handle environmental policy, professional licensing, and economic coordination. Where the federal government still exists but can’t be weaponized to block progress or impose oligarch rule on states that reject it.

The EU nations didn’t dissolve. They reconfigured.

The United States doesn’t have to fracture to decentralize. It can choose to become a union of genuinely autonomous states that cooperate where cooperation makes sense and diverge where divergence reflects genuine differences in values and priorities.

The infrastructure is being built by one side now.

Republicans abandoned their federalism project the instant they took power. Convention of States, state sovereignty, limiting federal overreach? They don’t need any of that when they control all three branches, have purged the federal workforce for loyalists, and have more than half the states ready to break the law to help them maintain power.

They’ll revive the state resistance playbook the moment a Democrat threatens to win again. If that ever happens. Many people who study authoritarianism will tell you: once fascists control all branches of government as a unified party, you don’t remove them through elections. They can steal elections, so why wouldn’t they?

The only question is whether Americans do this intentionally or accidentally.

Intentional confederation could be designed with protections for civil rights, clear rules for interstate cooperation, and mechanisms for resolving disputes. Accidental fragmentation could be chaotic, bitter, and destabilizing.

The pieces are already on the board.

The Convention of States needs 15 more states. But now that Republicans control everything, why would they agree to limit federal power? They won’t. The National Popular Vote needs 61 more electoral votes, but it doesn’t address the deeper problems we’re talking about.

There’s no path to an Article V convention as long as Republican states are unwilling to participate. The path forward is soft secession. Blue states building solidarity with each other. A union of states stronger together than apart.

The legal infrastructure exists.

The tools for restructuring America already exist. The resistance is already using them.

America is already becoming a confederation. The only choice is whether we design it or let it happen to us.

If you want to go deeper on this, I’ve written booklets on both Soft Secession and Oppositional Federalism. Physical copies are available at theexistentialistrepublic.com along with journals and opposition merch.

If you want the free versions, head to buymeacoffee.com/theer where you can download Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder (full length book), Oppositional Federalism, the intro to Soft Secession, trifold pamphlets, and a bunch of other resources.

Subscribe to The Existentialist Republic to get more like this. Share this piece if it resonated. And if you’re a state legislator or work with one, reach out. Let’s coordinate.