In my first post I wanted to make clear the specifics of what was happening with the National Guard. The President has the power to federalize the State National Guards. I wanted to make sure everyone knew that this is not a power Trump made up. It’s within his power and authority. As far as I know the last time this was done over the objection of state’s governor was during the Civil Rights era to enforce federal civil rights law. But every Presidential power can be abused and this is the one perhaps most liable to abuse. This whole situation is a definitional abuse of power. It is a wholly manufactured crisis. The President has the authority to federalize the National Guard. But the powers he takes from that decision are far from unlimited.
At the moment we know much less than we should about just what authority the President used to do this and what led up to that decision. The situation is developing rapidly. So it’s possible there is more information than I have seen. Did Gavin Newsom first refuse the President’s request to deploy the Guard? Or did the President just skip that entirely? Newsom’s public statement, as I noted earlier, was fairly vague about what was happening.
That’s important both because we just want to know the details of how we got here but also because the legal situation is pretty different under different scenarios. Just moments ago Ed O’Keefe of CBS reported that, according to the White House Press Secretary “the president invoked his Title 10 authority to federalize” the California state Guard. There are a bunch of smart lawyers on Bluesky and Twitter who understand the relevant statutes far better than I do. Joyce Vance says that doing it this way may bring the actions into conflict with the Posse Comitatus Act.
Again, I don’t know enough about these different statutes to discuss this part of it.
I’ll return to my earlier point. The larger context is public opinion in California and around the country. These are illegitimate actions and abuses of presidential power. How the public at large views this is critical to the future of the country and Donald Trump’s whole effort to create a Putinized, autocratic presidency. In my opinion every elected leader and really every citizen should be choosing their next moves with an aim to having this play out in such a way that the public views these actions in that way – as illegitimate, unAmerican. The future of the Republic, civic democracy is the real game here. Having the public reject the legitimacy of this decision is critical to that goal. So every decision needs to be made with that goal in mind.
I would start with Gavin Newsom. I understand that as governor he wants to avoid scaring the people of Los Angeles, adding to the climate of crisis. But he can avoid that while also stating more clearly what the stakes are, that the people of California have an elected government entirely capable of handling this situation and that we don’t have Kings. We don’t have military dictators who get to rule at the point of a bayonet.
