California National Guard in front of protestors in Los Angeles, 9 June 2025. Image: Wiki Commons
California National Guard in front of protestors in Los Angeles, 9 June 2025. Image: Wiki Commons
The judiciary is doing its part to hold up the rule of law. If we don’t want soldiers walking around in combat gear carrying automatic rifles in cities from Washington to San Francisco, the next move is up to us.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
All we had to see were photographs of D.C. National Guard soldiers picking up trash and raking mulch to understand that Donald Trump had no real interest in “solving crime” in Washington D.C., his stated purpose for deploying uniformed, armed soldiers there. Stephen Miller is certainly happy that there are armed troops present when his ICE Nazis round up undocumented migrants at Home Depot but using the National Guard to “solve immigration” isn’t Trump’s purpose, either.
As he usually does, Trump has stated out loud why he wants to use the National Guard: to intimidate blue cities in blue states because they voted against him. He’s not deploying the Guard in Louisiana, which has a rate of violent crime four times that of California, or in Mississippi, where crime is even worse. He says he wants to scare Chicago next by stationing armed soldiers in full combat gear on street corners around the “Windy City.”
What is there to stop him? During his recent kiss-my-ass-or-you’re-out cabinet meeting, Trump declared to his assembled slobberers that if he wants to send National Guard troops to Chicago, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the President of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it.” Today, Trump continued his process of attempting to terrorize Democrats when he announced that he will indeed send troops to Chicago, and Baltimore to boot.
Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been having a pretty good time trolling Trump over the last couple of weeks, filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s L.A. deployment. Today U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer issued his decision on Newsom’s lawsuit, ruling that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles was illegal because he had violated the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA). Breyer, the brother of former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, enjoined Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth from violating the PCA in California in the future. Breyer said that Trump and Hegseth intend “to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country—including Oakland and San Francisco, here in the Northern District of California—thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
Breyer wrote that “defendants instigated a months-long deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles for the purpose of establishing a military presence there and enforcing federal law. Such conduct is a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. These violations were part of a top-down, systemic effort by Defendants to use military troops to execute various sectors of federal law (the drug laws and the immigration laws at least) across hundreds of miles and over the course of several months—and counting.”
Breyer held that Trump’s orders violated the PCA in multiple ways: Trump specifically directed the commander of the deployment to use the soldiers for law enforcement purposes, an action banned by the PCA; failed to insist that the military forces coordinate with local law enforcement; and used an inadequate rationale to justify a military deployment for civilian law enforcement purposes.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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