A 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled for the Trump administration Monday in its attempt to deploy the Oregon National Guard to Portland.
Whether the Trump administration can execute on that deployment depends on the status of the district court’s second temporary restraining order, which the administration did not appeal. The first TRO, which it did appeal, blocked the deployment of the Oregon National Guard; the second blocked the Guard from any state and Washington D.C. Justice Department lawyers argued that this ruling would also dissolve the second TRO, but 9th Circuit Judge Susan Graber, in her Monday dissent, wrote that it would do no such thing.
The decision was a 2-1 split, with the two Trump appointees overturning the district court’s conclusion that the conditions on the ground did not fulfill the statutory requirements to deploy the Guard.
A judge on the 9th Circuit requested a vote for a full court rehearing of the case shortly after the ruling was published.
In a footnote, the panel majority (who did not sign the opinion), acknowledged the recent ruling from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals that blocked President Trump’s attempted deployment of the Guard to Chicago. The 9th Circuit judges argued that conditions are worse in Portland (where the district court found that protests have been fairly small and uneventful after a climax earlier in the summer) and “distinguishable” from those in Chicago.
Graber, a Clinton appointee, had asked her colleagues on the 9th Circuit to vacate the majority opinion in a scorching dissent.
“I urge my colleagues on this court to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the
illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur,” she wrote. “Above all, I ask those who are watching this case unfold to retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.”
Citing Portland protesters’ penchant for wearing inflatable frog costumes (or “nothing at all”), she wrote that the majority’s finding of violence and chaos in Portland could be taken as “absurd.”
“But today’s decision is not merely absurd. It erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights to assemble and to object to the government’s policies and actions,” she wrote.
She added that even at the height of the Portland protests, there was little proof that ICE was unable to do its work. And even if it was, she argued, letting a president deploy troops that long after a disturbance has occurred is effectively giving him license to do so at any time.
Judge Ryan Nelson — a Trump appointee who endorsed Trump’s arguments so exuberantly at oral argument as to suggest higher court aspirations — wrote a separate concurrence to argue that federal courts should not get to review the president’s decision to federalize and deploy the Guard at all.
He also applauded Trump’s “proportionate response to the events in Portland,” arguing that merely sending a couple hundred federalized troops into a state whose governor opposes their deployment earns the president an assumption of “good faith.”
Read the ruling here:
I really need to see the breakdown of costs here. How much taxpayers’ monies is being eaten up/ wasted by court cases, transportation of NG, and accommodations for NG.
I guess this was the administration’s response to Saturday’s events.
We demanded no kings, but we have one anyway, apparently.
Is fascism a required class in our law schools, or are our judges picking it up on their own?
The ones appointed by him seem to be falling right in line. As others have noted, this is the worst timeline. And, not only, but also, “But today’s decision is not merely absurd. It erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights to assemble and to object to the government’s policies and actions,” she wrote.” This is the whole of this "administration” in a nutshell.
The plain facts are staring the judges in the face. The situation on the ground in Portland is NOT worse than Chicago. Portland is a calm, peaceful city of 645K vs Chicago’s gritty, urban 2.7M. (A fact, not that there’s anything wrong with Chicago.) It is demonstrably NOT worse. Judges have a responsibility to be educated about the facts of the situations they are judging. That Chicago will not have NG deployment and Portland will is a travesty. Hoping the 9th Circuit en banc will act promptly.