On Thursday morning, three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit — two of them appointees of President Trump — will hear arguments on whether the president has unfettered authority to deploy troops even to U.S. cities or whether Mr. Trump has become “untethered to the facts.”
At issue is the lawfulness of Mr. Trump’s effort to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., which the White House on Tuesday called “a wasteland of firebombs, beatings, and brazen attacks,” but which another Trump-appointed judge, Karin Immergut, said was nothing of the sort.
Judge Immergut of the Federal District Court for the District of Oregon temporarily blocked Mr. Trump from deploying troops to Portland, ruling this weekend that he had most likely exceeded his authority under federal law. That law allows the president to call up the National Guard if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion.”
In a blistering opinion, Judge Immergut wrote that Mr. Trump’s assessment of the situation on the ground “was simply untethered to the facts.”
In their appeal, the government’s lawyers leaned on a Supreme Court case from 1827 to argue that the courts lack the power to review Mr. Trump’s decisions about when to deploy the National Guard. Questioning “the commander-in-chief’s military judgments,” they wrote, citing the 1827 decision, “is something district courts lack the authority and competence to do.”
The appeal will play out against escalating rhetoric from Mr. Trump, who has said that American cities are “war zones” and called for Democratic officials to be jailed. As it moves upward through the appeals process, the case may also prove to be a test for the Supreme Court, which in its interim rulings has largely given way to Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the power of the presidency in other areas, including withholding of congressionally appropriated spending and the power to fire the heads of independent agencies.
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The post Appeals Court to Weigh Legality of Deploying Troops to Portland appeared first on New York Times.
