Experts are warning that the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown in Minnesota could quickly get out of hand and could even result in a second US civil war.
Claire Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote in a Wednesday column published by the Guardian that she and her colleagues at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conducted a tabletop exercise in October 2024 that simulated potential outcomes if a US president were to carry out law enforcement operations similar to the ones being conducted by the Trump administration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.
“In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s National Guard,” Finkelstein explained. “When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces.”
Unfortunately they can be federalized as we’ve seen. Apparently it could be done already, but there was a law in like 2009 or so that gave the president more power to seize control of a national guard talked about in an Atlantic article about the imperial powers the presidency has accumulated over the centuries here around 2020 when we were staring down an open attempt to rig our elections.
Courts won’t stop them, not for long.
You’re thinking of this purely in legal terms, but the question is if the national guard will listen when they’re federalized or if they’ll refuse to follow orders.
An awful lotta people seem to think military personnel are robots, who automatically obey whoever is at the top. Honestly, it seems incredibly authoritarian minded to me, that such debaters don’t perceive soldiers to be people first, and job second.
Because literally all of US American history shows that soldiers will (with incredibly few very notable exceptions) always follow orders to commit atrocities.
Also, the federal military is directed to ignore illegal orders, if enough high ranking members split at a critical time, they could fracture into their own militia groups.
Idk, I think at most the democrats will challenge in court. They may win a few of the more transparent bad faith attempts to federalize, but not for long. And the lack of injunctions means they can just do another declaration under a different rationale, or do it in another city even if a federal judge declared in unlawful in one city. So every region is at the mercy of it’s federal judges. The farther you get through appeals courts to the supreme court, the more corrupt and beholden to the party they are too. Scotus thinks the republic is dead in all but name, and republicans are the unquestioned rulers from now on.
As far as obeying orders, most of the federalized national guard would be on street corners and the like. The questionable violent stuff they would do with coalitions of the willing, and they would find enough of them, whether it’s from the guard or law enforcement or even paramilitary groups in training like the proud boys that could be used to say beat protesters with clubs under the protection of the guard, not an incident without precedent.
Protesters need to think about defending themselves, as they have a legal right to do, but that’s another discussion.
So far there has been nothing but following orders. I doubt that will change.