What, if any, ability do (individual or groups of) US states have to sanction/penalize other US states?
I am imagining a scenario where the bizarre arithmetic of the electoral college has led to a consecutive sequence of presidential elections where the victor received less than half the popular vote and a dissatisfied majority is pursuing its options.
I understand that the Commerce Clause would limit any power for states to penalize others and presumably it would prevent anything along the lines of tariffs, embargos, or other economic barriers.
Do states (and especially groups of states) have any other available actions? Could they enforce travel restrictions on residents of certain states? Decline to admit them to their universities (the private ones, at least)? Seek to enact federal legislation discriminating against certain states? Is there anything they could do?
I’m not sure I really understand your question, or at least the motivation for why states would want to be penalizing other states.
But one thing they can do is provide major tax incentives to lure businesses to move from other states to theirs. This was an ongoing border war between Kansas and Missouri for a long time, especially in Kansas City. Businesses would hop the border every few years to reap tax cuts for doing so.
TLDR: the Attorneys General of Nebraska and Oklahoma petitioned a federal court for relief because residents of their states were going into Colorado, buying legal pot, and bringing back the devil’s lettuce into those two states, which had a less-progressive attitude towards the substance. The Supreme Court told the two AGs to fuck off.
With a combined population far greater than that of the states whose electoral votes put the federal administration into power, I am wondering what recourse the majority (of citizens and states) would have if they felt effectively disenfranchised from the federal government. If their beliefs and aspiration regarding things like abortion rights, LGBT rights, climate change, gun control, environmental protection, and health care were not just being ignored but subverted, how could they influence (or coerce) the likes of Idaho, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.
The states can sue each other in court. This is one of the very few sorts of cases that starts off directly in the Supreme Court, instead of being heard by lower courts first.
That’s the only real direct approach they have; trying to amend the Constitution or get Federal legislation passed to penalize another state or states is a lot more dicey than to just sue the other state in court to get them to stop doing whatever it is that your state doesn’t like.
And for that matter, states and groups of states can sue the Federal government as well, and vice-versa.
States can generally restrict non-residents from entering a particular area, this is often done with ecologically protected areas and areas with limited normal population. States also have broad emergency powers, for example New York is currently forbidding residents of COVID hot spots from entering the state without quarantining first. States can also restrict where people go; Georgia is notable for using ‘almost banishement’ as a court sentence - banishment from the state is illegal, but banishing someone from all but one crappy county has been upheld by Georgia’s courts and never (AFAIK) successfully challenged in Federal court. I am not sure if banning travelers from states for non-emergency reasons like ‘we don’t like this state’ would hold up in court, but a scheme of restricting residents of certain states to some annoying spot might.
Suppose Wyoming decides to holler “Uncle” in response to California’s (unspecified, but presumably severe) coercion? What sort of response are you imagining? (Should be both legal and likely to make California happy.)
There is a constitutional right to travel under the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment. Quarantine laws have generally been held not to violate the interstate commerce clause, but I don’t think there is any case law challenging such a law under the P&I clause. I think a law requiring anyone coming from a high-infection state to be quarantined is probably permissible. But if New York is saying that residents of State X who visit New York must quarantine, but residents of New York who return from a visit to State X do not have to, that might be a problem.
New York also threatened to sue Rhode Island early in in the pandemic when that state imposed quarantine on visitors from New York. I don’t think it ever did, perhaps because it determined that such a suit would likely lose.
Maybe I’m missing something here. Are you asking how states can effectively coerce/punish other states for exercising their sovereign right under the Constitution? Isn’t that like trying to punish your neighbor for planting a tree that is legal for them to do but that you don’t like?
Specific to this topic, I think it would be to try to get the states in question to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
There are some very limited economic measures that states can take against other states. I recall that during the fracas over the North Carolina “bathroom bill,” some other states forbade state-funded travel to North Carolina to attend conferences and prevented state universities from sending athletic teams there. States could restrict how their pension funds are invested to prohibit investment in companies based in other states.
In regard to your question about refusing to admit another state’s students to their universities, I don’t see why they couldn’t but that seems like the opposite of “punishing” the other state since out-of-state tuition is usually significantly higher than in-state.