U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that President Donald Trump’s administration violated the Posse Comitatus (“Power of the Country”) Act when it ordered the National Guard to Los Angeles, CA.
The stay expires on September 12. (Yes, I accidentally wrote injunction earlier. My bad.)
Trump cited 10 U.S.C. § 12406 as the legal authority that allows him to deploy the National Guard.
Nearly 140 years later, Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced. There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence. Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.
Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, preventing the government from using the military to enforce domestic law.
Breyer said Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth should “have stated their intention 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.”
The ruling only affects California.
“Because there is an ongoing risk that Defendants will act unlawfully and thereby injure Plaintiffs, Governor Newsom and the State of California, the Court ENJOINS Defendants from violating the Posse Comitatus Act as detailed below,” declared Breyer.
The government placed 4,000 National Guard troops and Marines “under the control of Task Force 51, U.S. Army North’s deployable contingency command post.”
Breyer laid out all of the evidence to support his decision, concluding that the trial’s evidence “established that Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.”
In footnote 22 on page 41, Breyer admonished the administration’s justification to use military force to protect federal property, finding it “unlikely as a descriptive matter to execute federal laws in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.”
I also raised my eyebrow at footnote 21 on page 41. Breyer admitted that Los Angeles faced large protests, some of which were violent. However, the police department “is no stranger to such protests,” mentioning BLM protests and rambunctious crowds after a major league team wins a championship.”
One part stuck out to me:
Second, though courts have not yet squarely faced the issue of a President using the military domestically in violation of federal law, the Supreme Court has clarified that the courts are not powerless to stop such executive overreach.
Hhhmm…okay, so, the actual issue has never gone through the courts?
Breyer cited Laird v. Tatum, which challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision to deploy federal troops to help with surveillance after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated under the Insurrection Act.
Perhaps I’m too tired after Rocklahoma, but I would think Breyer would have chosen a case that involved the Posse Comitatus Act, such as United States v. Banks. The case involved an “investigating NCIS Agent who orchestrated local law enforcement’s involvement, and was found to have illegally done the same in the past, clearly rendering the search and seizure of Gentles’ property at his home illegal.”
Perhaps I’m overthinking it.
Either way, I guarantee that the Supreme Court will ultimately hear the case.
In June, Breyer ruled that Trump’s order violated the 10th Amendment and exceeded his statutory authority.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals paused Breyer’s order, ruling that “the president had broad, though not ‘unreviewable,’ authority to deploy the military in American cities.”
[Featured image via YouTube]
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY