Trump’s orders to troops revisited

Judges take rare step of rethinking ruling on the president’s use of military on U.S. soil.

- SONJA SHARP

TROOPS bearing the Texas National Guard patch at an Army base in Illinois.

ERIN HOOLEY Associated Press

Three of the country’s most powerful judges met in Pasadena on Wednesday for a rare conclave that could rewrite the legal framework for President Trump's expansive deployment of troops to cities across the United States.

The move to flood Los Angeles with thousands of federalized troops over the objection of state and local leaders shocked the country back in June. Nearly five months later, such military interventions have become almost routine.

But whether the deployments can expand — and how long they can continue - relies on a novel reading of an obscure subsection of the U.S. code that determines the president’s ability to dispatch the National Guard and federal service members. That code has been under heated debate in courts across the country.

Virtually all of those cases have turned on the 9th Circuit's decision in June. The judges found that the law in question requires “a great level of deference” to the president to decide when protest flashes into rebellion, and whether boots on the ground are warranted in response.

On Wednesday, the same three-judge panel — Jennifer Sung of Portland, Ore., Eric D. Miller of Seattle and Mark J. Bennett of Honolulu — took the rare move of reviewing it, signaling a willingness to dramatically rewrite the terms of engagement that have underpinned Trump's deployments.

“I guess the question is, why is a couple of hundred people engaging in disorderly conduct and throwing things at a building over the course of two days of comparable severity of a rebellion?” said Miller, an appointee from Trump's first term. “Violence is used to thwart the enforcement of federal law all the time. This happens every day.”