Editorial: Newsom vs. Trump — The courts must strike down Trump's Los Angeles deployment
After President Donald Trump illegally federalized and deployed 2,000 California National Guard troops to ostensibly a nonexistent rebellion in Los Angeles, Gov. Gavin Newsom has sued the White House and Pentagon.
Good; in this country, these are battles that should be fought in the courts, not the streets, and an independent federal judge with life tenure should take little time to find that Trump has overplayed his hand.
The lawsuit does not appear to rest on any particularly complex legal arguments because it doesn't have to. It is plain as day that Trump is overstepping his authority by cutting Newsom out of the deployment. That will be doubly true now that he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are sending in 700 Marines, who have no business engaging in any law enforcement on U.S. soil. Active duty troops can only be used if the Insurrection Act is invoked, which must not happen.
What Trump and immigration czar Tom Homan are attempting to do is to instigate a problem. This started not with arrests of violent criminal illegal aliens, but protest demonstrations against ICE outside a Home Depot. There were chants of 'ICE go home' and 'No justice, no peace.' At one point in the standoff the feds fired flash-bang grenades and some in the crowd wrongly threw rocks. Elsewhere a crowd torched a car. The lawlessness must be stopped and the vandals apprehended.
But it's not a matter of calling in the Guard, against the wishes of the governor.
Trump used similar tactics during the 2020 George Floyd protests as he seized on isolated and sporadic acts of violence and looting to claim that the entire movement was a riot that needed to be pacified, sending in unidentified federal agents to detain people. Trump is now escalating to using the military in violation both of the law and of a slew of our democratic national principles.
The reason he and his lackeys would prefer to just use force to put down public demonstration is because they know they're losing the argument and slipping and popular opinion, as the public realizes it was sold a false bill of goods on the economy and that the administration wants indiscriminate arrests, not of criminals, but long-time community members — neighbors, friends, coworkers.
So the public is distracted, not by advancing a governing vision or changing course, but sending soldiers into the streets. Homan has already declared he could have Newsom arrested, just as the administration has done with other lower-profile dissidents.
Here in New York, Mayor Adams and NYPD Commissioner Jessie Tisch say that the NYPD is fully capable of maintaining security and safeguarding the right of all to peacefully protest.
Trump used the excuse of anarchy and lawlessness on the street to inject the National Guard and the Marines into L.A., despite not being legally allowed to do so. That won't happen here if the NYPD keeps control and prevents any outbreaks of violence.
As we said, the confrontation over Trump's L.A. power grab should be playing out in the courts, where passions are cool and the only tools are words, not armed force. Like with so many of the president's forays, the judiciary will apply the law and tell him to retreat, sending the troops back to the barracks.
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