Power Given to One President Is Given to All of Them

On October 9, the White House named Katie Zacharia its new press secretary. The next day, The Bulwark reported on posts she had deleted before she took the job. The archived copies are still public, and two of them deserve more attention than they’ve gotten.

On June 8, 2025, she answered California Gov. Gavin Newsom: “The federal government under @realDonaldTrump should take over all of California because clearly you can’t be trusted to do a single thing.” Eight days later, Stephen Miller, now the White House deputy chief of staff, posted that sanctuary cities were “engaged in a criminal conspiracy.” Zacharia shared it with three words: “Suspend habeas corpus.” About an hour later she replied to him directly and made the case: “Suspend Habeas Corpus for Invasion for the reason that public safety requries it.”

Those are two separate claims, and both are claims about power. The first says Washington may replace the government of a state when it decides that state’s leaders can’t be trusted. The second says Washington may hold people without bringing them before a judge when it decides public safety requires it. In each case, the only check is Washington’s own judgment.

A power given to one president is a power given to every president who comes after him. The people who cheer when it’s used on California never seem to ask who will hold it next, or which state will be on the other end of it. There is no version of “take over all of California” that can’t be rewritten as “take over all of Texas.” The only thing that changes is the name on the order.

We already know how this goes, because it has been done before, and the man who did it is still treated as a saint.

In April 1861, Abraham Lincoln authorized his commanding general, Winfield Scott, to suspend habeas corpus along the rail line between Philadelphia and Washington. Congress wasn’t in session, and he didn’t wait for it. On May 25, soldiers took a Maryland man named John Merryman from his bed at two in the morning and jailed him at Fort McHenry. Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled in Ex parte Merryman that only Congress could suspend the writ and ordered Merryman produced. The Army refused, and Lincoln ignored the Chief Justice of the United States.

He didn’t stop there. In September 1861, federal troops arrested members of Maryland’s legislature before it could convene. Among the men held at Fort McHenry was a Baltimore newspaper editor, Frank Key Howard, the grandson of Francis Scott Key. In 1863, the Army arrested Clement Vallandigham, a former Ohio congressman, for a speech. A military commission tried him, and Lincoln had him banished behind Confederate lines. The historian Mark Neely, who counted the surviving records, put military arrests of civilians under Lincoln at more than 13,000. In 1866, after the war, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan that trying civilians before military commissions while the civilian courts were open was unconstitutional, but by then the arrests were history.

Lincoln’s defense, in his message to Congress on July 4, 1861, was a question: “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?” Every president who has wanted a power the Constitution didn’t give him has made some version of that argument. Lincoln made it better than anyone, and Washington has been citing his example ever since.

That’s the inheritance Zacharia is drawing on, whether she knows it or not. Suspend the writ for “invasion,” and take over a state that can’t be “trusted.” The language changes, but the claim doesn’t. Washington decides when the emergency exists, Washington decides who the enemy is, and Washington decides when it’s over.

Presidents leave office, but the powers they claim stay behind. This isn’t about one administration, and it isn’t about California. It’s about whether any state in this union governs itself, or only governs itself until Washington decides otherwise. A union in which the federal government can take over a state is not a union of sovereign states. It’s a central government with 50 branch offices.

Texans can wait to find out which president decides Texas is the state that can’t be trusted. Or Texans can decide for themselves who governs Texas, by putting the question of independence to a vote. Merryman didn’t get that choice. We still have it.