No sooner did we issue our editorial called the “The Governors’ ‘Mutiny’” than an eagle-eyed reader wired us an excerpt from Virginia v. Tennessee. That’s the 1893 Supreme Court case in which the Old Dominion sued the Volunteer State to try to squirm out of an agreement the two had struck in 1803 in respect of their border. The case involves the clause of the Constitution forbidding states, absent Congress’s consent, from entering into “any” compact or agreement with another state.

Our editorial had warned that New York and other states might be askew of the compact clause when entering agreements over when and how to restart their economies during the pandemic. What our reader cabled us was an excerpt in which a unanimous Supreme Court seemed to suggest that an agreement between two states might not require congressional approval in a case of, say, “threatened invasion of cholera, plague, or other causes of sickness and death.”

“It would be the height of absurdity,” the justices reckoned, “to hold that the threatened states could not unite in providing means to prevent and repel the invasion of the pestilence without obtaining the consent of Congress, which might not be at the time in session.” The opinion was written up by Justice Stephen Field, whose life, an opponent said, was “found to be one series of little-mindedness, meanlinesses, of braggadocio, pusillanimity, and contemptible vanity.”

Sounds like he’d have been a helluva newspaperman. He missed his chance, though, and ended up on the Supreme Court, where he wrote that there are “many matters upon which different states may agree that can in no respect concern the United States.” The sale of a small parcel of land one state might own within another, say, would not require the consent of Congress. Yet in Virginia v. Tennessee, what stands out for us is not the similarities to the current crisis but the differences.

The interstate compacts being flirted with by, among others, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts in the East and Washington, Oregon, and California in the West deal with restarting our economy, which does concern America. Plus, too, the states and the President are at odds. So these compacts are just the kind of agreements that the plain language of the Constitution assigns to Congress, whose resolution of approval would depend on the President’s signature.

It’s not our suggestion that the states are entirely without standing. Only that there is a flashing yellow light. The Wall Street Journal has made the key point that there’s an upside for both the President and governors if they can work this out. The Democrats may want a longer shutdown and the Republicans an earlier restart. That makes it a classic political matter — and in an election year, to boot. All the more reason, in our view, for Mr. Trump to have marked his constitutional standing.

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Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.