President Donald Trump is lawlessly trying to use the Justice Department to change state bail laws and even threatening to send in the National Guard in a naked attempt to seize power that the U.S. Constitution grants to the states. This is an incredibly dangerous pattern.

There is a real debate to be had if cashless bail rules are too lax, but that’s not what Trump is doing. He wants states to bend to his will, even though the president doesn’t have a role in determining the penal statutes in the states. And he’s gotten the basic facts wrong. And he doesn’t have the authority to withhold federal funds from jurisdictions that don’t comply with his wishes.

Only a very few places have completely eliminated cash bail and New York isn’t one of them. In New York, the exact contours of our bail system have been the subject of heavy legislative and political discussion for years now, forming a significant part of multiple election cycles.

Legislators in Albany in 2019 approved significant bail reforms including an end to cash bail in some instances for nonviolent offenses, but not the worst crimes that Trump is talking about. And Albany has gone back to the drawing board several times since to reform the reform and then reform them again.

Yes, this might all be a little messy, but that is the natural way of democracy, where decisions can be made gradually over years and with starts and stops. It’s the worst system we’ve got, aside from everything else, as the saying goes.

Trump’s executive order directing his attorney general to compile a list of jurisdictions that have ended cash bail is not by itself an overstepping of federal authority (assuming AG Pam Bondi puts together an honest list). But punishing those places would be. The federal government cannot commandeer local and state laws for its own purposes.

That Trump is simply rolling with it anyway is just another indication that he doesn’t really care about or even actively encourages court challenges, knowing that he has enough of the judiciary — including the nation’s highest court — to try even with policies that are obviously suspect.

It bears repeating once more that similar action by Joe Biden, or frankly any Democratic president in modern history, would have elicited shrieks of condemnation from conservatives, who would have correctly dubbed the effort an unconstitutional intrusion into the sacrosanct rights of states and localities to govern their own sphere of public safety.

It’s clearer than it ever was that Trump has full license from those who once described themselves as small-government champions to use the full power of the federal government in advancing political ends, whether it means taking government stakes in private companies through a form of official extortion or forcing state governments to adopt preferred policy.

We have been critics of how bail reform has been handled under Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul and the Democrats in the state Legislature, but Trump’s decree has nothing to do with the prevalence of violent crime. He thinks that found a good stick to wave and he’s waving it.

Bondi’s list is due within 30 days. We’ll see what’s on her list and we’ll see what Trump and his administration does with the list. If he tries cutting back money, we will see him in court, where he should lose.

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