The federal-state collisions looming over New York

For New York liberals of a certain age, the term “states’ rights” has long been synonymous with segregation in the South. It’s personified by Alabama governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door,” in June 1963, to prevent desegregation of the state university. Wallace blocked two black students from entering the university auditorium, and the ensuing confrontation between the governor and the Kennedy administration signaled the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow system that followed the Civil War.

The governor was partly acting on the not entirely fallacious contention that under the federal system, state prerogative should sometimes supersede federal government edicts, and even rulings by the US Supreme Court. Wallace lost the battle, but it launched his national political career and inspired other modern conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, to embrace states’-rights rhetoric.

But now liberals find themselves on Wallace’s side of the argument, as President Donald Trump attempts to subjugate blue states with executive orders that would override sanctuary laws protecting undocumented migrants, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, and New York governor Kathy Hochul’s congestion pricing program. The federal courts will eventually decide on Hochul’s “stand at the Lincoln Tunnel exit.”

A more sensational federal-state collision looms over the Justice Department’s order to federal prosecutors to drop bribery and illegal fundraising charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams in what critics say was a brazen move by President Trump to buy Adams’s cooperation in the federal roundups of migrants. The interim US attorney for the southern district of New York, Danielle Sassoon, refused to obey the order and resigned, as did the lead Adams prosecutor Hagan Scotten.

Governor Hochul has the power to remove Adams for his alleged bargain with Trump. She has so far declined, saying that initiating the process would bring additional “disruption and chaos.” More likely is that Hochul, like Adams, is a product of the state’s Democratic party machine and thus reluctant to discard a fellow hack. She also doesn’t want to help her old boss, disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, now a hated rival, who is planning a political comeback in the fall and will seek to unseat Adams as mayor.

One problem with the states’-rights platform in New York is the lack of local heroes. Wallace was beloved in Alabama; there is no popular, reformist candidate on the left or the right to challenge Trumpism in the Empire State. I agree with Sassoon and Scotten that Mayor Adams is a con man, but I have a beef with him that has nothing to do with his allegedly taking money from shady Turks. He promised to do something about the city’s rat problem — even naming a “rat czar” — but it’s been a failure. In my section of the Upper West Side, I’m shocked by the number of rats I encounter on W. 77th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.

This impressive stretch of real estate, which faces the Museum of Natural History, is what a real estate broker once described to me as the West Side block for people who really want to live on the fancier East Side. No surprise, then, that in February, around 400 people filled the auditorium of the New York Historical Society, which fronts on W. 77th Street, to celebrate the legacy of Flaco, a Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023. Despite 13 years in captivity, Flaco thrived for an entire year, all over Manhattan, living largely on a diet of rats, which made him an oft-photographed and beloved citywide celebrity. Until his fatal collision with a building on the Upper West Side, most likely caused by his ingesting rat poison, I think Flaco had a political future. If it’s a Cuomo-Adams face-off in the June primary, I may write in a certain civic-minded owl.

The Adams administration has done one thing to improve city life: the near elimination of the Covid-era outdoor restaurant sheds that attracted rats. I’ve since discovered a great dining innovation that I overlooked when dining shacks obscured storefronts: a cash-only restaurant called Gennaro. Nothing chic about it, and something about the payment policy complements the straightforwardly excellent Italian cuisine.

Liberals offended by Trump’s war on DEI should learn from my YMCA pick-up basketball game on West 14th Street, which for nearly 23 years hasn’t required government intervention to force diversity, equity and inclusion. I don’t know of a more racially integrated, classless, and democratic institution in the city than the McBurney Y, which ignores the M and the C in its historic name (the Y is meaningless, anyway, since some cagers are over 80). True, very few women have played, but they’re welcomed when they do. Wouldn’t a better response to Trump’s rage against woke be simply to set a good example of tolerant equality, wherever possible? The only way to get excluded from McBurney is for fighting.

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.