title: "The Parking Spot: How Federalism Became America's Oldest Political Weapon" subtitle: "Nobody defends a parking spot on principle. You defend it because your car is there." author: Rebecca Rowan publication: For the Republic date: 2026-02-13

The Parking Spot: How Federalism Became America's Oldest Political Weapon

JD Vance is a Yale Law graduate. He serves as Vice President of the United States under the banner of a party that built its modern identity on a single constitutional idea: states' rights. And on January 8th, 2026 -- one day after a federal agent shot and killed an American citizen named Renee Good during an immigration raid in Minneapolis -- Vance went on national television and declared that those agents are "protected by absolute immunity" from state prosecution. (A second American citizen, Alex Pretti, would be killed by federal agents in Minneapolis just two weeks later.)

Read that again. The states' rights party's second-in-command just told the states to sit down and shut up.

Meanwhile, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison -- a Democrat, from the party that spent most of the last century championing federal power -- filed a lawsuit invoking the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment. The amendment that has been the sacred text of conservative constitutionalism for fifty years. Everyone is speaking the other side's lines, and nobody seems to notice -- or care.

What you're watching isn't hypocrisy. It's older than that -- and a lot more useful once you see it.

Nobody Believes in a Parking Spot

Federalism is not a constitutional philosophy. It's a parking spot.

You occupy it when you need it. You vacate it when you don't. Nobody defends a parking spot on principle. You defend it because your car is there. Drive away, and you couldn't care less who takes it next.

That's the Tenth Amendment. It's the constitutional argument of whoever doesn't control Washington -- and the constitutional inconvenience of whoever does. Whoever holds federal power discovers the necessity of federal supremacy. Whoever lacks it discovers the beauty of state sovereignty.

And this isn't new. Legal scholar Jessica Bulman-Pozen documented the pattern in the Harvard Law Review back in 2014, calling it "partisan federalism" -- the idea that states check federal power primarily through partisan opposition dressed in constitutional clothing. Americans are "particularly likely to identify with states when they are controlled by the party out of power in Washington." Not federalism as philosophy. Federalism as faction.

The polling is brutal. On requiring local governments to cooperate with ICE: 85% of Republicans favor it. 83% of Democrats oppose it. Near-perfect partisan symmetry, perfectly inverted in direction, almost zero overlap. That's a Fox News poll, by the way. When the positions are that cleanly mirrored, you're not looking at constitutional conviction. You're looking at tribal loyalty with constitutional trim.

Carnegie Endowment's Mariano-Florentino Cuellar -- a former California Supreme Court justice -- put it plainly: "The script has flipped 180 degrees."

But this isn't a 2025 invention. The parking spot has been there for 230 years.

The 230-Year Hustle

Jefferson and Madison invented states' rights as the weapon of the opposition party -- the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 were literally written to resist a federal government controlled by the other team. Then the antebellum South demanded states' rights for themselves while simultaneously demanding that Northern states enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. (Let that one settle: the same faction wanted state sovereignty when it served slavery and federal supremacy when state sovereignty threatened it. Sound familiar?)

Northern states responded by passing "personal liberty laws" forbidding state officials from cooperating with federal slave catchers -- the direct structural ancestor of modern sanctuary policies. I want to be clear: protecting people from enslavement is not the same as any modern immigration policy. Not remotely. But the constitutional mechanism -- state non-cooperation with federal enforcement -- is identical. The parking spot doesn't care about morality. It cares about power.

Eisenhower, a Republican, sent the 101st Airborne to override Southern state resistance at Little Rock -- federal supremacy asserted by the "small government" party. Under Obama, Republican attorneys general turned state sovereignty into an industry: Texas AG Greg Abbott's office filed over 30 lawsuits against the federal government on everything from the ACA to environmental regulations to gun rules. The Tenth Amendment had never been so popular.

Now? The same party asserts absolute federal supremacy on immigration. The amendment didn't change. The power dynamics did.

But Immigration Really Is Different -- Until It Isn't

There is, however, one genuinely strong objection to the parking spot thesis, and I want to give it real air.

Immigration is constitutionally different from most policy areas. The plenary power doctrine -- nearly 140 years of continuous Supreme Court precedent, originating in the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889 -- recognizes that Congress has "plenary and unqualified power" over immigration. It touches national sovereignty, foreign relations, and border security simultaneously. A Republican who championed states' rights on health care and now champions federal supremacy on immigration may be drawing a constitutionally defensible distinction: health care regulation is not an exclusive federal power; immigration arguably is.

This is real. I'm not going to wave it away.

But here's where it breaks down: plenary power supports federal authority over immigration policy -- who can enter, who can stay, the terms of legal status. It does not create "absolute immunity" for federal agents who kill American citizens. Legal scholar Michael Mannheimer, writing on the Volokh Conspiracy -- a libertarian legal blog, not a progressive one -- called Vance's claim "absolutely ridiculous." The legal consensus against him crosses every ideological line there is. Plenary power also doesn't override the anti-commandeering doctrine that protects states from being conscripted into federal enforcement. And it doesn't authorize punishing resistant states by withholding unrelated federal funding.

Most importantly: if the "immigration is constitutionally different" argument explained the current posture, Republicans would be confining their federal supremacy claims to immigration. They are not. The SAVE Act, passed by the House on a party-line vote, would require states to submit their voter rolls to DHS for vetting -- federal mandates on state election administration, from the party of "states run their own elections." When Trump pushed Indiana to gerrymander its congressional maps, 21 Republicans in the state Senate defied him, voting 31-19 against the plan. State Senator Spencer Deery -- a Republican -- vowed to resist federal pressure on his state for as long as he had breath.

The immigration defense is strongest when confined to immigration. The moment you widen the lens, it collapses -- because the same politicians making the constitutional distinction aren't confining themselves to it. They're asserting federal supremacy across the board. Which is exactly what the parking spot thesis predicts.

I'm going to editorialize for a moment: I know the parking spot metaphor is deliberately reductive. Constitutional federalism is genuinely complex -- different clauses, different allocations, different domains. But that complexity is precisely the camouflage. Politicians hide their inconsistencies in the weeds. The parking spot strips the weeds away. That's not a limitation. That's the whole point.

The Only Question That Matters

The value of naming this pattern isn't "look at these hypocrites." Democrats did the same thing when they held federal power and fought state resistance to the ACA tooth and nail. The parking spot isn't a partisan indictment. It's a structural description.

But I want to flag something the structural analysis alone can miss: while the mechanism is bipartisan, the current application involves federal agents killing American citizens and a Vice President claiming absolute immunity from state prosecution.

The pattern is symmetrical. The stakes, right now, are not.

The next time any politician invokes "states' rights" or "federal supremacy," the question is no longer "is this constitutionally correct?" The question is: Would this person's position change if the other party controlled Washington? If the answer is yes -- and for most political actors, across 230 years of American history, the answer has been yes -- then you're not witnessing a constitutional argument. You're watching someone park.

Spot Check

If federalism has always been a weapon, can it be made into something more? Or is the honest answer that the Constitution's most celebrated structural feature has been a convenient fiction from the start?

I think the honest answer is uncomfortable but not hopeless. Principled federalists do exist. Spencer Deery fought his own president on it. Ilya Somin at George Mason has criticized federal overreach under both parties for decades. Randy Barnett popularized the term "fair-weather federalism" to shame his own side. These people are real. The problem is that they are consistently outvoted, overruled, and abandoned by their own parties the moment federal power is at stake.

The principle isn't dead. It's outnumbered.

Naming the parking spot dynamic honestly won't make it disappear. But it is the precondition for changing it -- because you can't hold politicians accountable for inconsistency they've convinced you doesn't exist. Once you see the parking spot, you can't unsee it. And the next time someone tells you they believe in states' rights or federal supremacy, you'll know exactly which question to ask.

That's the beginning of accountability. And maybe -- maybe -- the beginning of something better.

Revision Log

Fact-Check Corrections

• RED FLAG FIXED: Minneapolis shooting timeline. The original draft stated "days after federal agents shot and killed two American citizens" as though both killings preceded Vance's January 8 statement. Only Renee Good had been killed (January 7). Alex Pretti was killed January 24 -- more than two weeks later. Rewrote the opening to name Good specifically, place Vance's statement one day after her killing, and add a parenthetical noting Pretti's subsequent death. This preserves the "two Americans killed" hook while making the timeline factually accurate.
• YELLOW: Plenary power math. Changed "135 years" to "nearly 140 years" (the Chinese Exclusion Case was 1889; publication date is February 2026, making it approximately 137 years).
• YELLOW: Deery quote. Removed quotation marks from the paraphrase. The original draft used "with his last breath" in quotes, but Deery's actual words were "As long as I have breath, I will use my voice to resist a federal government that attempts to bully, direct and control this state." Rewritten as a looser paraphrase: "vowed to resist federal pressure on his state for as long as he had breath."
• YELLOW: Mannheimer attribution. The "absolutely ridiculous" quote was attributed to "Reason magazine's Volokh Conspiracy" as an institutional voice. Reattributed to "Legal scholar Michael Mannheimer, writing on the Volokh Conspiracy," which correctly identifies the person who said it while preserving the cross-ideological framing.
• YELLOW: Hyperlink mismatch. The Columbia Law scholarship link (Bulman-Pozen's paper) was hyperlinked as though it documented specific Republican AG lawsuits. Removed the misleading link and replaced with a factual statement about Abbott's office filing 30+ lawsuits, which is independently well-documented.
• YELLOW: Cuellar description. Removed "president of one of the most credible governance institutions in America" (editorial characterization presented as objective fact). Replaced with the factual credential "a former California Supreme Court justice," letting the Carnegie Endowment name and the credential speak for themselves.
• BLUE: Barnett "coined." Changed "coined" to "popularized" per fact-check note that the term "fair-weather federalism" appears in other sources and Barnett's origination cannot be verified.

Structural Changes

• Hook closing transition: Replaced "What you're watching is not hypocrisy. It's something older, more structural, and far more useful to understand" with the punchier "What you're watching isn't hypocrisy. It's older than that -- and a lot more useful once you see it." per editorial note.
• Section header "The Bigger Picture" renamed to "The Only Question That Matters" for more personality and specificity per editorial note flagging the original as generic.
• Section header "Once You See It" renamed to "Spot Check" -- sardonic callback to the parking spot framework, matching corpus header style.
• "The Bigger Picture" asymmetry beat given its own paragraph and breathing room rather than being crammed mid-paragraph, per editorial structural note.
• Editorializing paragraph rewritten per editorial suggestion for tighter, rawer language: "complexity is precisely the camouflage" replaces the more measured original.
• Close tightened. Final line compressed from "That's the beginning of holding them accountable. And maybe -- maybe -- of holding the principle itself to a higher standard than anyone in 230 years has managed" to "That's the beginning of accountability. And maybe -- maybe -- the beginning of something better." per editorial note about shorter, more clipped closers.
• "Here's the framework:" throat-clearing removed from the parking spot introduction per editorial note. Bold statement now stands alone.

Voice Adjustments

• Contractions normalized. Changed "It is the constitutional argument" to "It's the constitutional argument" per editorial note about the author's consistent use of contractions.
• "This isn't a novel observation" changed to "And this isn't new" per editorial note about "novel" being too formal.
• "The polling bears it out with brutal clarity" changed to "The polling is brutal" per editorial note.
• "almost entirely devoid of overlap" changed to "almost zero overlap" per editorial note about academic register.
• Cuellar attribution compressed from 19-word credential pile-up to 8-word attribution per editorial note.
• Moral disclaimer rewritten: "the moral contexts are not remotely equivalent" changed to "protecting people from enslavement is not the same as any modern immigration policy. Not remotely." -- more conversational, matches corpus disclaimer patterns.
• Historical sweep section: Added factual detail about Abbott's 30+ lawsuits to flesh out the Obama-era example per editorial note about it being under-developed. Added "The Tenth Amendment had never been so popular" as a sardonic fragment punch.
• Fragment as punch added: "The amendment didn't change. The power dynamics did." -- dropped the original trailing sentence "The parking spot changed hands" which was redundant given the framework is already established.
• Italics for vocal stress added in several places to match corpus density of emphasized words.

Unresolved Notes

• Bulman-Pozen direct quote vs. paraphrase: The fact-check BLUE flag notes that the phrasing attributed in quotes to Bulman-Pozen may be a paraphrase rather than her exact words. The source material presents it with quotes, but the original paper should be checked before publication. Left the current quotation marks in place pending author verification.
• Cuellar "script has flipped 180 degrees" quote: The writer's notes flagged this as drawn from source summaries rather than the original Carnegie article. The fact-check confirmed the phrase via web search but recommended verifying against the original. Left in place pending author verification.
• "Single constitutional idea: states' rights" characterization: The fact-check BLUE flag notes this could be challenged as reductive (the GOP's identity encompasses multiple constitutional ideas). This is clearly rhetorical emphasis rather than a factual claim, and it serves the argument's setup. Left as-is but flagged for the author's awareness.
• Word count: Final article is approximately 1,530 words (excluding metadata and revision log), within the target range.