How can blue states fight back against Trump? With fiscal disobedience | Eric Reinhart

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : It is the material expression of political belonging and shared obligation.
54% : What’s needed are mechanisms that translate state and citizen dissent into material leverage.
52% : It is only from that basis that collective ethical and political life can acquire power great enough to topple fascism – and to replace it with a genuine democracy that fosters difference rather than seeking to annihilate it.
51% : And one of the most provocative – and potentially powerful – ideas available is the creation of state-administered escrow accounts, or “in trust” funds, to temporarily hold federal tax revenues until the federal government upholds its constitutional obligations and withdraws its authoritarian threats.
51% : Administratively, state governments would need to build new fiscal infrastructure to receive and track payments.
50% : It would also underline for everyone the authoritarian, violent nature of the federal government’s tactics rather than allowing them to proceed under the thin guise of “law and order”, as Trump leverages his control over legal systems to wage war against his personal enemies.
50% : If even a portion of federal tax remittances from these states were held in trust, the federal government would face not an isolated legal challenge but substantial fiscal obstacles to its current belligerence.
50% : Escrow accounts, when deployed through a coordinated strategy, do precisely this: they turn the flow of money, the lifeblood of federal power, into the explicit site of political struggle.
50% : It would also force the supreme court, which is increasingly aligning itself with Trump against the constitution, to directly confront fundamental questions about the balance of state and federal power.
50% : And Trump will seize on any opportunity to paint blue states as “insurrectionists” who must be violently crushed – but the regime is already inventing fictions to justify this regardless of on-the-ground realities.
50% : Trump is breaking the outer limits of the constitutional order and bending law to his advantage.
49% : It could standardize escrow mechanisms across member states, ensuring legal coherence and shared administrative capacity; create a pooled legal defense fund to support court battles; coordinate triggers for releasing funds, so that the federal government faces a unified set of demands; and protect against selective federal retaliation by presenting a united front representing tens of millions of residents and trillions in economic output.
49% : It would give residents a concrete way to participate in opposing the Trump regime, transforming legal disputes into collective political action.
49% : The legal barriers to fiscal disobedience are formidable in part because the federal government has never before faced coordinated, large-scale challenges of this kind from wealthy states representing a majority of national tax revenue.
48% : Taxation is never merely technical.
48% : In such contexts, withholding or conditionally redirecting tax flows can become a way to re-politicize the fiscal relationship.
48% : Instead, the state would act as a temporary custodian, receiving payments from residents and businesses equal to their federal tax liabilities, holding them in trust for the federal government, and releasing them only when certain constitutional conditions are met – such as the partisan cessation of federal defunding and the withdrawal of military deployments unauthorized by targeted states.
46% : How it could workStates could establish this system through legislation to create a tax receivership fund, explicitly designated as a trust account for federal tax liabilities.
45% : But Democratic cities and states, progressive non-profits, universities, non-white immigrants, and public health institutions are already facing direct conflict with Trump’s government.
45% : Importantly, this scheme does not purport to nullify federal taxes or claim state sovereignty over them.
44% : As the anthropologist Janet Roitman argued in her study of taxation and sovereignty in central Africa, acts of “fiscal disobedience” emerge not simply as refusals to pay but as political interventions that expose ruptures in the reciprocal obligations underlying fiscal authority.
42% : As is evident from Chicago – where I am writing this with Black Hawk helicopters flying overhead night and day and where my friends, patients, elected representatives, and neighbors are being assaulted in their homes, in hospitals, and on the streets by federal agents acting with total disregard for either reality or legality – a rapid escalation of political violence in America is well under way.
39% : Faced with this reality, Democratic governors need more than legal complaints and rhetorical protest.
38% : But that is precisely the point: to force a constitutional confrontation over whether the federal government can target states for political punishment while continuing to demand unquestioned fiscal obedience.
37% : State-administered escrow accounts will not solve the crisis of American democracy, but they could help shift the terrain of struggle away from unilateral federal domination and toward a contested, negotiated, and coordinated anti-fascist federalism much better equipped to contest the destruction of US democracy.
34% : Trump subsequently called for Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s mayor, and Pritzker to be jailed for not supporting his agenda.

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