Governors do have power, but if they're up against a president or the courts and are on the losing side they have to decide whether to up the ante or fold.
They have to choose whether they can actually win a fight or not, and if they can't they eventually will have to back down.
I don't like Jeb that much -- he's not very inspiring -- but I don't fault him for not wrenching disagreements up into major crises if the consensus is that the other side has come out on top.
It used to be that people recognized the governors had executive experience and were likely to be good contenders for the presidency. Nowadays, governors are so tied up by real world constraints that they can be outbid by candidates without any executive experience who promise that they'll never compromise or back down, but really, if Ted Cruz were a governor, people would be making the same kind of attacks on him that they make on other candidates, because he'd have had to make the same kind of compromises and concessions that governors with real world responsibilities have to make.
Amazing the lengths you will go to to justify liberalism. Your whole post ignores the 10th Amendment.