Twenty-five Republican governors have lent their support to GOP Gov. Greg Abbott as he doubles down on his defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court order to allow the federal government to remove the razor wire that the state had put up along a stretch of the United States-Mexico border with Mexico at Eagle Pass.
Abbott first posted on social media on Tuesday that the Texas National Guard would “continue to hold the line” at Eagle Pass. Then, in a statement released Wednesday, Abbott claimed that the Biden administration had “broken the compact” between the states and federal government by, in Abbott’s view, failing to enforce immigration laws. He has won the support of at least 25 governors for declaring immigration an “invasion” and invoking “Texas’ constitutional authority to defend and protect itself.”
In a column published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Thursday, Will Bunch observed that some online commenters had likened the potential standoff at Eagle Pass to the one at Fort Sumter, North Carolina, that triggered the Civil War. However, he thought another historical comparison had merit.
“Abbott’s reckless, cruelty-is-the-point policies and his defiant stand are also posing the greatest threat to federal authority since the South’s ‘massive resistance’ in the 1950s and ’60s to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Ed ruling that mandated school integration,” Bunch wrote.
In his statement, Abbott referenced founding fathers James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and based his argument on the U.S. Constitution. He pointed to Article IV, Section 4, which promises federal protection against “invasion” and Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3, which acknowledges a state’s “sovereign interest” in protecting its borders. He wrote:
The failure of the Biden administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV,........