OPINION:
Kristi Noem met with Portland’s police chief Tuesday, and the homeland security secretary is still unhappy. Politicians who run the deep-blue city won’t let cops back up the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who have been under siege for months.
Black-clad, soy-fed antifa rioters have been disturbing the peace, blocking roads and violently resisting all attempts to relocate the foreign intruders who moved into the liberal Oregon enclave. Portland police officers are under orders to do nothing about left-wing violence.
President Trump chose to dispatch the National Guard to liberate the federal facilities. Infuriated state officials sued, acknowledging the existence of the 10th Amendment for the first time in their lives to make a persuasive case.
U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut agreed. She issued an emergency injunction Sunday to stop the mobilization. She opined that “regular forces” were enough to quell disturbances in June when the situation was more volatile, so the soldiers weren’t needed now.
That’s a fair assessment, but it’s not her call. The Constitution gives Congress the authority to make laws to provide for “calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union.” The statute Congress passed grants the president discretion to summon troops “in such numbers as he considers necessary” to enforce federal statutes.
Neither the Constitution nor Congress says the commander in chief should consult a low-level magistrate before acting. In a strange twist, this particular black-robed functionary isn’t an obstructionist Democratic appointee.
Mr. Trump nominated Judge Immergut in 2018, but she has always been a political chameleon. A registered Democrat, she changed allegiance so President George W. Bush could appoint her as Oregon’s U.S. attorney in 2003.
When political winds shifted and President Obama moved into the Oval Office, Gov. Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, handed Ms. Immergut a cushy Multnomah County judgeship. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley served as her champions in Mr. Trump’s first term, and the Democratic duo weren’t shy about using blue slips to preclude better candidates.
Hopefully, the administration has fortified its personnel review process because this isn’t a close call as a legal matter. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in the administration’s appeal Thursday. Even though it’s the most liberal jurisdiction in the country, the judges gave Mr. Trump a win on military deployments in June.
Sending an army to beat down ungovernable factions has been a core power of the chief executive from the beginning of our republic. President Washington personally led 13,000 militiamen to Pennsylvania to suppress the band of 500 unruly protesters who torched the federal tax collector’s house in the Whiskey Rebellion.
Judge Immergut would suggest Washington’s response was overkill. Washington proclaimed the issue was “whether a small portion of the United States shall dictate to the whole union, and at the expence of those, who desire peace.” The same words apply today.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller explained on X, “The intention and purpose of the attacks on ICE is to prevent ICE from performing its duties and to force as many ICE officers as possible out of the field and into a defensive posture. It is a violent armed resistance designed to incapacitate the essential operations of the duly elected federal government, by force.”
The president has a constitutional duty to safeguard his men whenever they come under threat. That his response is disproportionate is exactly the point.
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