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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