California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey.Getty Images

Author’s note: If you want one place to see my published work, academic papers, and the frameworks behind this series it’s all on ChristopherArmitage.com. The site is new, so I would love your feedback in the comments. Also the Call To Action at the bottom of this piece is one of my favorites ever and will get it’s one article soon.

On October 15, 2025, the governors of 15 states and territories launched the Governors Public Health Alliance. Their states hold more than one-third of the U.S. population. Member governors share disease surveillance data, draft their own public health guidance, coordinate emergency response, and plan joint purchases of supplies like vaccines, functions the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention performs. No one asked Congress. No one had to.

Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution requires Congress’s consent before a state may “enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State.” A deal between state governments is called an interstate compact. The same sentence conditions peacetime troops and warships on that consent too, and the framers grouped the two because the fear behind both was states combining against the union. Which agreements need that consent, the text does not say.

The Supreme Court answered in Virginia v. Tennessee (1893), a dispute over the two states’ shared border. Congressional consent, the Court held, is required only for combinations tending toward “the increase of political power in the States” at the expense of federal authority. Everything else, states may sign without asking.

U.S. Steel Corp. v. Multistate Tax Commission (1978) showed how far that reaches. States had created a joint tax commission with permanent staff in 1967 and never asked Congress. The Court upheld the commission without congressional consent because any state may join or decline, any state may quit at any time, the joint body cannot bind a member state, and every rule takes effect only when a state’s own legislature or agency adopts it. States have copied those four features ever since. Seven years later, Northeast Bancorp v. Board of Governors (1985) held that states passing matching, reciprocal laws with nothing signed have not formed a compact at all.

Refusal is the other half of the toolkit (tier 1 in the taxonomy of state opposition). In Printz v. United States (1997), the Court held the federal government cannot order state officers to administer federal programs, and in Murphy v. NCAA (2018), the Court struck a federal statute forbidding states to repeal their own sports gambling bans. The practice is old: in the 1850s, Northern legislatures passed personal liberty laws that pulled state jails and state officers out of Fugitive Slave Act enforcement. Refusal multiplied across states changes federal policy: Congress passed the REAL ID Act in 2005, state legislatures rebelled, and the Department of Homeland Security began enforcing it on May 7, 2025, 20 years late.

Coordinated building goes further than coordinated refusal (tier 2). Eleven Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states operate a carbon market, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, through a shared nonprofit, and their 73rd allowance auction this month generated $1 billion for state clean energy and bill assistance programs. Arizona, Connecticut, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington State pool prescription drug purchasing through ArrayRx, whose free discount card saves residents up to 80% on generic drugs.

Twenty-four states and Washington, D.C., license and tax recreational cannabis while federal law still prohibits the drug, and 40 states allow medical use. The Multistate Tax Commission the Court blessed in 1978 still audits corporations for member states today.

The same tools support far more than discount cards, and whether states can build full safety nets was answered generations ago. Under the Tenth Amendment, powers the Constitution never handed to the federal government stay with the states, and spending state money on state residents was never handed over. Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1932 that a single state may “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Five years later the Court upheld Washington State’s minimum wage in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, and in Gonzales v. Oregon (2006) the Court blocked a U.S. attorney general from using federal drug law to shut down Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act. States lose this ground only when Congress writes a statute taking it, and in health benefits Congress has done that once: the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), which a federal appeals court read to void Hawaii’s first-in-the-nation employer health mandate, until Congress exempted Hawaii’s law in 1983. The exemption stands and so does the program. Income support carries no such statute: most states already pay a supplement on top of federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Alaska has paid every resident an annual dividend from state oil wealth since 1982.

ERISA binds every state whether or not a federal dollar is involved, and what the statute forbids is state regulation of private employers’ benefit plans. I answered the objection in “Every State Can Afford Universal Health Care.” Congress exempted government employee plans from the statute entirely, so a state can insure its own workforce and open that plan outward. And ERISA never forbade a state taxing generally and covering residents directly: the Supreme Court drew that line unanimously in New York State Conference of Blue Cross v. Travelers (1995) and California Division of Labor Standards v. Dillingham (1997), and again in De Buono v. NYSA-ILA (1997) and Rutledge v. PCMA (2020). Four unanimous rulings across 25 years. A publicly owned insurer raises no ERISA question at all, since a public carrier competes for customers like any other. Hawaii needed its exemption because Hawaii’s law orders employers to buy coverage; a state that covers residents itself needs none.

The “how” was answered abroad, at exactly this scale. The European Union’s 27 member governments keep 27 separate national health systems, and Brussels operates none of them; the members coordinate. During the pandemic, the European Commission negotiated with vaccine makers for every member at once and secured 2.6 billion doses through joint purchase, and a European Health Insurance Card lets a Dane treated in Lisbon send the bill to Copenhagen. Those are this piece’s mechanisms wearing European names: joint procurement is the Governors Public Health Alliance’s plan, Europe’s carbon market is RGGI’s older sibling, cross-border coverage is a compact away, and mutual recognition of licenses is a statute states already trade. Coalition states have the economies to match: California’s $4.1 trillion economy passed Japan’s in 2024, and Japan insures every resident and pays every retiree a national pension. I laid out the affirmative program, publicly owned utilities, public broadband, state public banks, and state single payer, in “The States’ New Deal.” The coalition machinery in this piece is how states fund and staff that program together.

The coordination extends into the courtroom (tier 3). At least 22 Democratic attorneys general signed a common interest agreement, a standard litigation tool that keeps shared legal strategy confidential, months before the 2024 election. Their coalition filed its 100th multistate lawsuit against the administration in April 2026 and has won 55 of 67 court rulings.

The compacts Congress approved decades ago are assets too. Under Cuyler v. Adams (1981), an approved compact has the force of federal law, and activity that fits inside the approved text needs no new vote of Congress. The Emergency Management Assistance Compact, approved in 1996 and joined by all 50 states, lets any governor send personnel and equipment to any other governor who declares an emergency.

Criminal enforcement was pre-approved before any of it. In 1934, Congress granted advance, blanket consent to compacts between states for cooperation in preventing crime and enforcing their criminal laws, so a coalition crime compact needs no new vote of Congress. And every state has already adopted the Uniform Act to Secure the Attendance of Witnesses, a 1936 law by which a court in one state compels a witness in another state to testify or produce records in its criminal case. Combined with the common interest agreement above, coalition attorneys general can investigate the Epstein files and public corruption together, share what each office finds, refer each file to whichever state’s criminal code the conduct violated, and let that state prosecute; the Constitution’s Extradition Clause obligates every state to deliver the accused. A conviction won in state court for a state crime is beyond the reach of a federal pardon.

The strategy loses sometimes, and the losses mark the borders. In Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council (2000), the Court struck a Massachusetts law sanctioning companies that did business with Burma’s military government: foreign policy stays federal. In Perpich v. Department of Defense (1990), the Court held the Pentagon may send a state’s National Guard to overseas training over the governor’s objection. States pursuing this strategy file on every front at once and accept the record that follows: some sure things lose, and some long shots win.

Everything here is out in the open. Every alliance charter and every matching statute sits available for the public. The strategy stays quiet because the strongest moves look like paperwork: procurement contracts, licensing reciprocity, data-sharing agreements, practically identical bill text introduced in a dozen legislatures.

The whole approach is a soft secession. The quiet quitting of a collapsing state, as the more pragmatic member parties aim to insulate themselves from the worst of the fall.

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CALL TO ACTION

Who you’re contacting and how: Reach out to one of your state legislators or to your governor’s office by email, phone, or even a printed letter. If one of those has gotten you a response from a government office before, use it again, and if not, try a method you haven’t. You could even go to the office during business hours, bring fresh fruit or donuts, and tell the staff you’re going to talk to them about an issue you care about.

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Let them know who you are, what you want, and why you care. Offices count identical messages once, so write it in your own words.