In March 2015, the Republican Senate leadership publicly encouraged U.S. states to defy the president’s authority. In an op-ed in the Lexington Herald Leader, Mitch McConnell urged states to ignore Obama’s regulatory order limiting greenhouse gas emissions. It was a stunning undermining of federal authority. The following year, Arizona state legislators debated and nearly passed a bill prohibiting the state government from using any of its personnel or resources to enforce executive orders that had not been voted on by Congress.
