Head he wins, tails we lose
The Pentagon has for weeks been planning a military deployment to Chicago as President Donald Trump seeks to crack down on crime, homelessness and undocumented immigration, in a model that could later be used in other major cities, officials familiar with the matter said.
Trump on Friday touted his ongoing National Guard intervention in D.C., where more than 2,200 Guard members have been deployed in what he has cast as an overdue effort to crack down on crime. He zeroed in on Chicago as the next target.
“Chicago’s a mess. You have an incompetent mayor. Grossly incompetent,” Trump said, in remarks that were immediately dismissed by Chicago’s leaders as unfounded. “And we’ll straighten that one out probably next. That’ll be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.”
The officials familiar with the matter said that a military intervention in Chicago has long been in planning, probably in conjunction with expanded operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to search for undocumented migrants.
This is of course in violation of the law, to wit the Posse Comitatus act. The president is not supposed to unleash the military on cities unless there’s a genuine crisis.
[Illinois Governor JB] Pritzker said in a statement Saturday night after this story was published that the state of Illinois had received “no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.”
He added that there is “no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”
And that means he is violating the law by doing it.
Trump deployed both the National Guard members and a battalion of Marines in California in June while citing “incidents of violence and disorder” that had occurred during ICE operations to round up undocumented immigrants. Under the law Trump used, Title 10, the troops are generally prevented from being involved in law enforcement.
The California deployment was contested in court, with Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and other officials questioning whether Trump had violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that prohibits U.S. troops from carrying out civilian law enforcement actions. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that Trump’s orders violated the law, but his decision was halted by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.
So here we are.
How do you “crack down on homelessness”? You can steal their belongings and make their lives more miserable, but unless you’re going to kill them or imprison them, they’ll still be there and they won’t have housing.
I wish they’d all get a taste of their own medicine, be poor and without housing.
Since no one stops him, the law has become irrelevant. In our new world, Trump is the law.
iknklast:
Or as the French king Louis XIV (apocryphally?) said: “L’État, c’est moi:” I am the State. And we all know what that royal attitude led to.
Perhaps Trump’s tailor should fit him out in period costume. Melania, I dare say, could help hime learn French.
So much for “State’s Rights”.
Mike:
Given that the Republicans have promoted themselves since the 1970s (if not earlier) as the “Party of Small Government”, this is quite hypocritical.
Of course, ask the Orange One’s fanatical followers and they’ll said that they loyally is to Trump, not the Republicans. If the Donald ran as the candidate for the Natural Law Party and they’d still support him.
I’m not surprised that he wants to target Chicago first. We were the city that humiliated him during the 2016 campaign–he’d set up one of those ridiculous rallies, but his goons hadn’t quite figured out that he was actually not very well liked. Roughly a quarter of the tickets to the rally were snatched up by protestors. When his advisors figured out how badly they’d screwed the pooch, they declared (falsely, of course) that the CPD had told them the rally was ‘too dangerous’, and so Trump fled the scene, and all the attendees were dumped into the street, waiting for their buses (a large portion of his supporters had been bussed in, since his support in Chicago is so minimal). Naturally, the protestors started taunting them, and in general the whole thing was just… sad, really, in the best schadenfreude fashion.