Gov. JB Pritzker on Friday commended two Republican governors who have publicly denounced President Donald Trump’s effort to send National Guard troops to Illinois and called on more GOP leaders to speak out against White House “overreach.”
The dissent from the Republican governors of Oklahoma and Vermont came three days after Pritzker sent a letter to National Governors Association Chair Kevin Stitt urging chief executives on both sides of the aisle to call out the deployment of Texas National Guard troops in Illinois as unconstitutional.
Stitt, the Oklahoma governor, criticized Trump’s deployment Thursday, along with Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, who called it “unnecessary.” Pritzker, a Democrat, on Friday said he thinks more officials in the president’s own party feel the same way.
“Republicans out there also believe in the law and the Constitution,” Pritzker said at a Hickory Hills news conference, a day after the Illinois attorney general’s office won a temporary restraining order against the deployment.
“I think there are a lot in elected office who have been unwilling to say anything for fear of the retribution of the president, perhaps in Republican primaries. But I think it’s telling that two Republican governors have spoken up, and I know there are many others who want to. … I’d like to see them do it,” Pritzker said. “We ought to see a lot more because the overreach here is — I mean, it’s over the top and very disturbing to those of us who believe in the Constitution.”
The Illinois governor this week wrote to the National Governors Association that “[t]his is precisely the federal and interstate overreach we warned against — gubernatorial authority being trampled, state sovereignty being ignored, and the constitutional balance between states being attacked.”
Stitt on Thursday told the New York Times in an interview that he supported Trump’s efforts to protect ICE agents, but said he was worried about the precedent set by the guard deployment.
“We believe in the federalist system — that’s states’ rights,” Stitt said. “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”
He added, “As a federalist believer, one governor against another governor, I don’t think that’s the right way to approach this,” according to the interview. Stitt said his views were his own, and not intended to serve as a statement for the National Governors Association.
Also on Thursday, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott told reporters at a news conference that he felt Trump’s deployments to Chicago and Portland, Oregon, against the will of their local leaders was unconstitutional, according to Vermont publication, VTDigger.
“I don’t think our guard should be used against our own people. I don’t think the military should be used against our own people. In fact, it’s unconstitutional,” Scott said. “Unless, of course, there’s an insurrection, much like we saw Jan. 6 a few years ago.”
Pritzker slammed GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for sending his state’s Guard members to Illinois little more than a year after Abbott, Pritzker and governors of all 48 other states sent a letter to then-President Joe Biden urging him not to assert more authority over Air National Guard members.
“Now here a year later, we have Gov. Abbott doing exactly the opposite,” Pritzker said. ”This is the exact same thing. … Nobody in their right mind thinks that it’s appropriate for a president of the United States, in this regard, to send troops, to federalize National Guard and send them into American cities.”