To hear Attorney General Jeff Sessions tell it, the federal government is engaged in a titanic struggle over the very integrity of the United States. Its opponent: the defiant state of California, whose “lawless open border radicals” now apparently rank alongside the slave-owning aristocracy and other civic villains of American history.

“I understand that we have a wide variety of political opinions out there on immigration. But the law is in the books, and its purpose is clear,” Sessions told the California Peace Officers’ Association in an address on Wednesday. “There is no nullification. There is no secession. Federal law is the supreme law of the land. I would invite any doubters to Gettysburg, and to the graves of John C. Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln.”

To counter this supposedly dire threat to the republic, Sessions’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit against California in federal court on Wednesday, taking aim at three state laws that limit the state’s cooperation with federal immigration officials. State legislators passed all three measures last year in response to the election of President Donald Trump, who has called for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and ratcheted up arrests and removals.

“They, our citizens, want our government to think about them for a change to consider their interests,” Sessions said, casting his hardline immigration policies as democratic prudence. “They have dreams too. Frankly, this commonsense concept was a key factor in President Trump’s election. Elections have consequences.”

Depicting the federal government in a position of weakness may be a sound rhetorical strategy. But it doesn’t capture the power dynamics at play. What Sessions’s bluster and the lawsuits elide is that the challenged California laws are far less obtrusive than they claim. They might even improve federal immigration enforcement along the way.