Twenty-four state attorneys general and two governors filed suit against FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security last month, and the complaint reads less like a dispute over hurricane preparedness than a constitutional stress test. Congress appropriated billions in Homeland Security Grant Program funding for disaster response and counterterrorism readiness. FEMA and DHS now say a fifth of that money stays locked in Washington unless states switch to paper ballots, run manual audits of their voting systems, screen every registered voter and election worker through DHS’s SAVE database, and commit police resources to federal immigration enforcement.

The agencies have also reserved the right to terminate the grants “at any time and for any reason” — a phrase that tells you the Trump administration knows it’s on thin ice and builds a trapdoor instead of a bridge.

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I spend my working life evaluating whether fiduciaries honor the terms under which they hold someone else’s money. The federal government is, in a real sense, a fiduciary of the public purse, bound by the terms Congress writes into an appropriation. When an agency attaches conditions Congress never authorized, it isn’t administering a grant. It’s helping itself to power that belongs to somebody else.

The Constitution allows Washington a fair amount of that kind of pressure, within limits the Supreme Court has spent 40 years defining. South Dakota v. Dole upheld withholding highway funds from states that wouldn’t raise their drinking age to 21, but set four........

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