Mikie Sherrill’s Looming Trump Troubles

WASHINGTON — A host of issues, from rising health insurance premiums and looming federal cuts to social and economic programs, to the state’s budget deficit and the struggling NJ Transit system, will flood Mikie Sherrill in January when she is sworn in as the 57th governor of New Jersey.

Selecting a cabinet, including the role of attorney general, the state’s top law-enforcement post, and proposing a budget, will be early tasks.

“The dominant thing that hits really early,” said Kristoffer Shields, director of the Eagleton Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University, “is the state budget.”

“That’s the thing that overrides everything else,” Shields said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “That’s going to have to happen quickly and it’s really complicated.”

Complicating the budget proposal — due in late February or early March — is a series of looming federal spending cuts and tax changes President Donald Trump and a Republican-majority Congress passed and signed into force, a sweeping law that rewrote dozens of federal tax incentives and will slash about $1 trillion in Medicaid funding and about $285 billion in food-aid over the next decade.

Those pending federal cuts are just some of the challenges in a broader in a thicket of threats from the Trump administration New Jersey’s newest governor will confront. Sherrill, a four-term member of Congress, former military pilot and moderate Democrat during her time in Washington, was elected Tuesday, besting Republican Jack Ciattarrelli to replace the term-limited Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat.

On health care, the incoming Sherrill administration will have to decipher new federal rules to implement the congressionally-mandated cuts to Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for the low-income and disabled, and to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, a national anti-hunger program that 42 million Americans and 850,000 in New Jersey rely on.

A squeezed flow of federal money to New Jersey will increase pressure on a neophyte governor as they try to organize their administration and lead the state in a period when the Trump administration has been hostile to liberal states nationwide.

“If you’re dealing with all of these sorts of federal funding cuts, it makes it a lot harder to put into place the ideas that you had when you came into office,” Shields said.

At the tail end of the campaign, when Trump threatened to “terminate” funding for the Gateway Program, a $16-billion public works project decades in the works, Democrats jumped on the move, arguing Sherrill would try to rebuff similar budget moves from the Trump administration once sworn in.

State advocates want Sherrill to be a bulwark against Trump, whether he’s moving to cut money from an already-dug transportation project, expanding immigration detention sites in the state or expanding offshore oil-and-gas drilling, all policies the White House has floated.

“This will be the person who will hold the line while the federal government continues to fail us,” Nedia Morsy, state director of Make the Road New Jersey, an advocacy group, said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “We’re looking for leadership that has a lot of clarity of purpose and real consistent direct alignment with the needs of working families.”

Morsy said stabilizing rents, freezing utility bills, protecting undocumented immigrants, creating a state heat safety standard for laborers and blocking the use of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in South Jersey are issues her group will focus on in the new administration.

“We expect the next governor to lean in and seek transparency and do everything possible that a converted military base camp turned into immigration detention camp will never see the light of day,” Morsy said.

For immigrant advocacy groups, protecting the state’s Immigrant Trust Directive, a policy that limits state police from cooperating with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the chief federal agency tasked with arresting and holding the undocumented, is of paramount importance.

New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin, a Murphy appointee, has been a persistent legal force against the Trump administration, most prominently in a national lawsuit to defend birthright citizenship.

“We are going to continue to do the work that matters to everyday New Jerseyans, but this matters too, in a state with 2 million immigrants,” Platkin told NJ Spotlight News in a May interview on the Supreme Court plaza after oral arguments on the case.

Platkin has been among the more active Democratic attorneys general suing the Trump administration in its second term. While Sherrill said she would not retain Platkin as attorney general, she could appoint a more progressive replacement.

Facing a president that has targeted critics, moved to limit free speech, ignored congressional budget law and undercut the rule of law, Sherrill must understand the gravity of the moment, Amol Sinha, executive director of ACLU-NJ, said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News.

“This is the context in which the governor-elect is going to be reaching the state house,” Sinha said. “There’s no one thing that’s a panacea,” he said when asked about protecting New Jerseyans’ legal rights from federal threat. “But what we need to do is to turn New Jersey into what we’re calling a ‘firewall for freedom.’”

The new governor will also arrive in office just as health insurance premiums for people who receive coverage under the 2010 federal health law, known as Obamacare, are going to spike by about 16%, unless Congress steps in, something lawmakers in Washington are highly unlikely to do.

Topping off the list of threats to New Jersey emanating from Washington is the helter-skelter way in which Trump and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill have canceled, threatened to cancel, brought back and then cancelled again funding in Democratic-leaning states.

Notably, an out-of-the-blue funding freeze the White House budget office issued in January, plunged the country into a brief but dramatic funding crisis when it halted hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of grants.

“They don’t care. Chaos is their plan,” Sen. Andy Kim (D) said of the administration at the time.