Call it Plan B. Donald Trump believes he has the authority to order the National Guard into Portland and other cities where local law enforcement refuses to support and protect federal agents enforcing immigration law. At least one appellate court -- the Ninth Circuit, surprisingly -- unanimously agrees. A couple of district court judges notwithstanding, Trump has a solid case if this gets challenged all the way to the Supreme Court.
However, Trump has plans for Portland in particular if the city and Governor Tina Kotek want to play hardball, Politico reports:
They are confident the Trump administration will prevail in court after a federal judge twice blocked the White House’s efforts to send troops into Oregon because she ruled that the president’s move lacked legal basis. The administration has appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and would almost certainly take the case to the Supreme Court if needed.
“To be frank, if somebody wants 20-1 odds that this temporary restraining order would survive Supreme Court review, I’d give it to them,” said Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at The Article III Project, a Trump-aligned legal organization founded in 2019. “That’s how strongly I think this is doomed to be reversed.”
But even as the White House insists the president is on firm legal ground, Trump has made clear he has a plan B: the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that gives the president emergency powers to deploy troops on U.S. soil to quell what the president deems an insurrection.
“If I had to enact it, I’d do it,” Trump said in the Oval Office Monday. “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”
Would that apply in Portland? The activities of Antifa, especially directed at federal buildings and officers, certainly leans in that direction. The failure of Portland to effectively address this violence, not just now but over the last several years and in particular 2020 in the George Floyd riots, lends itself to that interpretation as well. Sen. Tom Cotton urged Trump to take this action directly at that time in a New York Times editorial that prompted a staff rebellion and eventually convinced Bari Weiss to depart for saner pastures.
Trump may have a better case in Chicago than Portland for an insurrection. At the same time that J.B. Pritzker claimed in court that no insurrection was taking place in the Windy City, Mayor Brandon Johnson declared parts of the city off-limits to federal law enforcement. That is in itself a form of rebellion, even if it's a rather impotent form. It was still enough to draw notice from Trump this morning, who vented his spleen on Truth Social:
Naturally, this got tongue-clucking and fainting-couch treatment by the Protection Racket Media, while Johnson's declaration that the federal government had no jurisdiction in areas of Chicago passed almost without comment. The progressive Left has embraced its inner Orval Faubus so completely that it hardly draws any attention at all these days.
However, there's a good reason to hold off on this. An Insurrection Act declaration makes the federal government responsible for the city in question, at least politically if not fully legally. That would allow Kotek to make every problem in Portland Trump's fault, and the same is even more true in Chicago with Johnson and Pritzker. That's why "several key allies and White House officials" are counseling against this Plan B, and instead leaking it as a threat to Kotek, Pritzker, Newsom, Johnson, et al as a consequence for further obstruction. The Insurrection Act is the nuclear, "break glass in case of dire emergency" option -- and it has the potential to flip voters on what is now an 80/20 issue on immigration if it backfires.
It's better to play the strong hand. Trump has plenty of authority for his current deployments to protect federal property and operations. Play out that string first, while keeping Plan B visible.
Editor’s Note: Democrat politicians and their radical supporters will do everything they can to interfere with and threaten ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws.
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