Trump’s use of troops may turn on a dictionary

As courts debate legal definition of rebellion, the law book’s editor has some concerns.

- SONJA SHARP

LAW enforcement officers look from an ICE facility at a protester wearing a frog costume in Portland, Ore.

JENNY KANE Associated Press

At the center of the sprawling legal battle over President Trump's domestic military deployments is a single word: rebellion.

To justify sending the National Guard to Los Angeles and other cities over the outcry of local leaders, the Trump administration has cited an obscure and little-used law empowering presidents to federalize soldiers to “suppress” a rebellion, or the threat of one.

But the statute does not define the word on which it turns. That’s where Bryan A. Garner comesin.

For decades, Garner has defined the words that make up the law. The landmark legal reference book he edits, Black's Law Dictionary, is as much a fixture of American courts as black robes, rosewood gavelsand brass scales ofjustice.

The dictionary is Garner’s magnum opus, as essential to attorneys as Gray's Anatomy is to physicians.

Now, Black's definition of rebellion is at the center of two critical pending decisions in cases from Portland, Ore., and Chicago—one currently being reheard by the 9th Circuit and the other on the emergency docket at the Supreme Court — that could unleash a flood of armed soldiers into American streets.

That a dictionary could influence a court case at all owes in part to Garner's seminal book on textualism, a conservative legal doctrine that dictates a page-bound interpretation of the law. His coauthor was Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice whose strict originalist readings of the Constitution paved the way for the court's recent reversal of precedents on abortion, voting rights and gun laws.