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's Vice President of the United States, serving under a party that built its entire modern identity on one 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. Sacred text of conservative constitutionalism for half a century. 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 suddenly discovers the beauty of state sovereignty. Every time. Without fail. For 230 years.

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. Almost zero overlap. That's a Fox News poll, by the way. When the positions mirror each other that cleanly, you're not looking at constitutional conviction. You're looking at tribal loyalty wearing 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. That's it. That's the origin story. Not high constitutional theory. Political warfare.

Then the antebellum South demanded states' rights for themselves while simultaneously demanding that Northern states enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Let that settle for a second: 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 here: 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.

Fast forward. 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? Same party, 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 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, going back to the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889 -- recognizes that Congress has "plenary and unqualified power" over immigration. It touches national sovereignty, foreign relations, border security all at once. A Republican who championed states' rights on health care and now champions federal supremacy on immigration might be drawing a constitutionally defensible line: health care regulation isn't 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 on American soil. 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.

But here's the thing that really kills the "immigration is special" defense: if that argument actually 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. Widen the lens and 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 damn 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, it has been -- 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. They exist. And the problem is that they're 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.

Humanizer Notes

Patterns Found

This article had already been through significant editorial passes, so the AI fingerprinting was subtler than typical first drafts. The main tells were: sentence-length uniformity (most sentences clustered in the 20-30 word range with insufficient variation -- the corpus oscillates wildly between 3-word fragments and 50-word builds); residual formality in the historical section (the 230-Year Hustle read more like competent summary than a mind with opinions about the history it's reciting); minor hedge language remnants ("There is, however, one genuinely strong objection" is academic phrasing the corpus voice wouldn't use); and insufficient vocal stress via italics (the corpus uses italics heavily as a signature emphasis tool, and the draft underused them). The article's commitment to its thesis was already strong -- this was not a both-sides piece -- so the hedging problem was localized rather than structural.

Key Changes

• Broke sentence-length monotony throughout. Added short punches ("That's it." / "They are not." / "They exist."), fragments, and one-sentence paragraphs, especially at key argumentative turns where the corpus voice would land a hit. Lengthened some setup sentences to create more contrast.
• Injected personality into the historical section. "That's it. That's the origin story. Not high constitutional theory. Political warfare." gives the history an editorial voice rather than a textbook summary. "Let that settle for a second" replaces the more formal original construction.
• Added italics for vocal stress in several places to match corpus density -- "championing," "might," "not," "industry," "explained," "actually" -- calibrated against the heavy emphasis patterns in pieces like "The Lie of the Strong Man" and "King of the Hill."
• Tightened connective tissue. Removed "in direction" from the polling paragraph (padding). Changed "most importantly" construction to "But here's the thing that really kills the 'immigration is special' defense" -- more conversational, more committed, more like the corpus voice.
• Stripped the revision log. Internal process documentation doesn't belong in the published output.

Confidence

High. The article was already in good shape from prior editorial passes -- the heaviest lifting had been done on structure, facts, and voice. My changes focused on rhythm variation, vocal stress calibration, and injecting the small imperfections (fragments, tonal shifts, register mixing) that separate "competent writing" from "writing that sounds like a specific person wrote it." The data-heavy immigration rebuttal section was the hardest to humanize because factual density constrains phrasing, but breaking the argument into shorter paragraphs with a standalone "They are not." helped. The piece should now sit comfortably alongside the corpus samples.