Dear Editor:

There’s a story about a Union officer asking a captured Confederate soldier why he had risked his life in the Civil War. Not being familiar with Southern drawl, he thought the prisoner had said, “We’re fighting for our rats.”

So it was and so it continues to be a major theme in American history: determining where federal authority ends and states’ rights begin.

Our current president has exploited this dilemma for his own advantage and to divide voters into hostile camps.

After his failed coup attempt and while he was out of power, he incited state law enforcement and National Guard personnel on the Texas border to oppose and interdict federal officials as they carried out their Constitutional duties to manage immigration affairs.

When asked during the presidential campaign whether he supported a national ban on abortion (which he had demanded in 2018), he ducked and said that it would be up to individual states to legislate their own policies on abolishing or protecting women’s bodily autonomy.

But now that he is beginning his second (and America’s last?) term in office, the federal hammer is dropping on states’ rights.

Notice the warrant-less ICE raids in New Jersey and Chicago, part of his plan to send red-state militias and U.S. military forces into blue-state schools, churches, and health-care facilities to arrest and deport “illegal aliens”; an executive order to preempt California’s right to manage its own water resources; and his plan to impose a national “right” to carry concealed weapons upon states working to protect their citizens from gun violence.

The states’-rights doctrine doomed the Confederacy’s rebellion against the Union, but now it may save our United States from the imperial and unconstitutional power grab by the Trump administration.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay