Trump Deploys Marines to L.A.

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2 days ago

700 Marines dispatched: President Donald Trump sent 700 Marines to California, where riots and protests against immigration raids are still going on, to protect federal property and personnel. This follows the deployment of the National Guard and several days of protests in San Francisco and Los Angeles that local and state police have struggled to get under control. Of course, the administration hasn't decided what the rules of engagement are just yet. Or where the deployed troops should sleep:
"A statement by the U.S. Northern Command said that 2,100 National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines will protect federal personnel and property under the command of Task Force 51, the headquarters that has been assigned the mission," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The forces have been trained in de-escalation, crowd control, and standing rules for the use of force, the command said." But California's governor, Gavin Newsom, has objected to these deployments, saying this is escalatory and a violation of state sovereignty. And yesterday, the state sued the Trump administration over its deployment of state troops and U.S. Marines, calling it "illegal."
Bloomberg notes:
The law strictly limits the federal deployment of troops within US borders. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, along with amendments and supporting regulations, generally bars the use of the active-duty U.S. military—the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines—from carrying out domestic law enforcement.
Important exceptions to the 1878 law are contained in the 1807 Insurrection Act and its modern iterations, which allow the president, without congressional approval, to employ the military for domestic use in certain circumstances. The Insurrection Act has been used very rarely to deploy troops under federal control domestically without a request from a state government, with examples mostly dating from the Civil Rights era.
So this might explain Trump's use of insurrectionist language: He's giving himself legal room, and he's already made clear he loves using statutes from the 18th and 19th centuries, meant for times of war, to expand his own power. "The people who are causing the problems are bad people, they are insurrectionists," the president told a group of reporters Monday. He added that Newsom, a vociferous critic of the administration's actions, is "a nice guy" but also "grossly incompetent."
Border czar Tom Homan has been making the TV rounds, promising arrests for anyone who obstructs Immigration and Customs Enforcement's ability to do its job—hinting that even public officials might meet a sorry fate.
"Come and get me, tough guy," Newsom had told Homan, antagonizing him a bit. "I'd do it if I were Tom," said the president. But like so much of partisan politics right now, all that appears to have been bluster. "There's no intention to arrest" California's governor, Homan backtracked yesterday.
RFK Jr.'s big shakeup: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just fired the entire 17-member Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), which reports its findings to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "to avoid conflicts of interest" and to "restore public trust in vaccines."
"The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust," writes Kennedy in The Wall Street Journal. "Whether toward health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or vaccines themselves, public confidence is waning. Some would try to explain this away by blaming misinformation or antiscience attitudes. To do so, however, ignores a history of conflicts of interest, persecution of dissidents, a lack of curiosity, and skewed science that has plagued the vaccine regulatory apparatus for decades."
Kennedy cites the Rotashield incident as an example: "Committee members regularly participated in deliberations and advocated products in which they had a financial stake," he argues in the Journal. "The CDC issued conflict-of-interest waivers to every committee member. Four out of eight ACIP members who voted in 1997 on guidelines for the Rotashield vaccine, subsequently withdrawn because of severe adverse events, had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies developing other rotavirus vaccines." This was further confirmed by the HHS Inspector General's report in 2009.
Some of these now-dismissed ACIP appointees had been selected by former President Joe Biden in January. The last-minute series of appointments seems to have been intended to preserve a pro-vaccine majority on ACIP heading into a potential shift like the one we're seeing now. But Biden may not have taken into account the degree to which the Trump administration prefers to move fast and break things.
Like with so much of what RFK Jr. peddles, there's a grain of truth within: The Rotashield incident was disturbing, and increased transparency into advisory committee actions would be good; but an incident from 30 years ago (that was subsequently investigated and rectified) doesn't necessarily mean the whole advisory board should be thrown out or that all of their decision making is invalidated. And Kennedy relies on strange reasoning at times, objecting to the "exploding" immunization schedule. But the sheer number of doses recommended does not tell us very much about whether those vaccines are safe and valuable, and what types of risks are present.
It's hard to say how much this actually changes things or how worried you should be: ACIP reviews new vaccines but is also tasked with evaluating existing vaccines. Lots of families already make the choice to deviate from the standard vaccination schedule, mostly in minor ways that don't really cause significant issues with herd immunity (i.e. delaying a less-important vaccine—think rotavirus or PCV, not polio—by six months or 1 year, or spacing out the doses). The traditional childhood vaccines—polio, MMR, DTaP—still have rather high uptake rates (over 90 percent; higher for polio), and newer vaccines not generally required by public schools like HPV and COVID have high opt-out rates. Though skepticism toward the MMR vaccine has increased at times since the '90s, uptake is still decently high.
It will probably take a long time for school immunization schedules to drastically change, and parents' decisions will probably continue to roughly track those requirements; but it is also possible that a new ACIP could overhaul all of this, give parents worse recommendations for how to vaccinate their children that lead to cyclical outbreaks (like measles), or that a showdown could take place where school districts and the federal government are at odds as to what requirements ought to exist.
"I support vaccines," RFK Jr. said in his confirmation hearings back in January. "I support the childhood [immunization] schedule." Maybe so, but in his new posting, he has an awful lot of power to alter both requirements and recommendations. Turns out Cabinet appointments have real consequences.
Scenes from New York: The state Senate passed the Medical Aid in Dying assisted suicide bill yesterday. Now it heads to Gov. Kathy Hochul's desk. But a few components of this bill make it very different from others in states like Oregon and Vermont: There's no waiting period and physicians aren't required to fill out reports to state authorities (so it will be very hard to track data to learn how many people are availing themselves of this option). Furthermore, the text specifies that assisted suicide is only available to patients who will be dead within six months according to "reasonable medical judgment" but it does not specify whether this means with or without treatment.
"There is no waiting period in the New York bill. That's the first time I've seen this," bioethicist Richard Doerflinger told The Free Press. A patient could say "in a moment of despair at first getting his or her diagnosis, 'Oh my God, I just want to die,' and sign off, and that's the end of the process."
Waymo will be suspending service in San Francisco, where protests are also underway, after part of its taxi fleet was damaged by L.A. protesters and rioters. ("Waymos don't have human drivers, they're devoid of humanity," one San Francisco activist told The New York Times. Destroying the robot taxis is "symbolic of the attempts, throughout the history of this country, by the tech industry to strip us of community.")
Inside Peru's gang-driven crime wave
"Elon Musk's allies inside the Trump administration are newly vulnerable after the mogul's bitter public breakup with the president," reports Semafor. "MAGA loyalists are taking advantage of the Trump-Musk rift to threaten the standing of anyone in the administration who's perceived as too close to the Tesla CEO. Leading that charge is former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, whose long-running animosity toward Musk peaked last week with the former calling to deport Musk from the US and the latter deeming Bannon a 'Communist retard.'" Bannon has started criticizing David Sacks in particular, apparently.
Interesting:
Another Weisenthal tweet. I can't help it if they're good!
Twitter-famous (and somewhat widely reviled) "menswear guy" admitted he's here illegally (in a pretty good post). Now J.D. Vance is responding with memes implying he's going to deport him:
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