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Trump tries his best to invade Portland, law be damned



You may have enjoyed a restful weekend, but do you know who absolutely did
not? U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, who was tasked with handling a
lawsuit against the Trump administration over whether it could invade Oregon
based on vibes.

On Saturday evening, after an emergency hearing over whether the
administration could federalize the Oregon National Guard to protect federal
agents in Portland facing a sustained assault by—checks notes—a dude in a
chicken suit and two 60-something social workers, Immergut ruled that no, the
vibes just weren’t right, and issued a temporary restraining order barring the
Trump administration from federalizing the Oregon National Guard and deploying
them to Portland.

Well, the administration wasn’t going to let a silly thing like a court order
get in its way, so it came up with a new plan: Send 200 already-federalized
California National Guard troops to Oregon instead, because “nyah nyah nyah,
you can’t touch me,” basically.

Of course, this just meant everyone was back in Immergut’s courtroom on Sunday
night, with the addition of California, which joined Oregon’s existing lawsuit
because forcing California troops to go to Oregon is just as much a violation
of California’s state sovereignty and autonomy as it is Oregon’s.

It did not go terribly well for the administration.




 



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After a brief hearing in which Immergut had to remind a Department of Justice
lawyer who was arguing the case, Eric Hamilton, that he was indeed an officer
of the court, and refusing to answer questions about the administration’s
defiance of her order was ridiculous.

Fun fact: Hamilton is already the subject of a whistleblower claim over
whether he and two other DOJ attorneys lied to Judge Amy Berman Jackson in a
case involving the shutdown of the Consumer Financial Protection Board.

What a gem.

Sunday night ended just as Saturday’s did: with the administration bound by a
court order blocking it from sending National Guard troops to Oregon. This
time, though, Immergut clearly did not want the administration to figure out
some absurd loopholes, so she ruled quickly from the bench right at the close
of the hearing. Now, the administration is barred from sending the National
Guard from any other state or Washington, D.C., to Oregon.

Immergut had to make her order that broad because while President Donald Trump
was trying to move California National Guard troops into the state, he was also
getting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to lend him a few hundred National Guard members
to lead an invasion into Oregon, California, and Illinois—wherever the vibes
lead, really. So, Immergut’s order made sure to forestall any attempts to send
any out-of-state guard members to Oregon, along with barring the attempts to
send Oregon guard members to Oregon.

Unfortunately, this decision covers only the situation in Oregon, so it does
not protect Illinois, where the administration is now trying both to federalize
the Illinois National Guard and also send Texas guard members.

There is simply no roadmap for what to do when a red-state governor, like
Abbott, happily volunteers to do Trump’s dirty work and offer up the Texas
National Guard to invade other states.

Meanwhile, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is handling all of
this super well.

Just kidding! He’s posting through it, a hilariously snot-nosed performance in
which he, not a lawyer, lectured sitting federal judges about how the law
works. And how dare those judges not adopt Miller’s unique view of the
Constitution’s supremacy clause, a view in which Trump can do whatever he wants
and cannot be stopped by the courts.




 



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Did we mention that Immergut was appointed by Trump during his first term?
She’s a judge who cut her teeth working for Ken Starr during his relentless
investigation into then-President Bill Clinton before going on to be a federal
prosecutor under President George W. Bush. Not exactly a liberal squish.
However, Immergut does seem to believe in the rule of law, a thing the Trump
administration has wholly abandoned.

Trump and his allies are treating these attempts at cross-state deployments
as something that doesn’t in any way constitute an invasion of one state by
another. Much like the “debate” conservatives ginned up over birthright
citizenship, creating uncertainty over a long-settled constitutional
protection, here the administration has injected an absurd and ahistorical
argument that it isn’t one state invading another because if the president does
it, it’s magically fine.

It is not magically fine. The sovereignty and autonomy of states is a
foundation of American democracy, no matter what Trump thinks. Anyone who tells
themselves this isn’t illegal, unconstitutional, and republic-destroying is
just kidding themselves.



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