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‘If the president believes that the state is not executing federal law, then he has the authority to do this,’ one professor says

Did President Trump have the authority to send more than 2,000 National Guard troops and about 700 U.S. Marines into Los Angeles to help quell riotous protests that have unfolded in the city in recent days that have led to the destruction of property, looting, arson incidents, and the injury of five police officers?

Depends on who you ask.

Jeremy Paul, a professor of law and former dean of Northeastern University School of Law, said the move passes muster.

“If the president believes that the state is not executing federal law, then he has the authority to do this,” Paul told Northeastern News, adding whether the commander-in-chief should do it is another conversation entirely.

The White House said in a statement on Sunday that “violent mobs have attacked ICE Officers and Federal Law Enforcement Agents carrying out basic deportation operations.”

The Marines are reportedly there to protect federal personnel and property and are not at the so-called frontlines of the riots.

“… In the wake of this violence, California’s feckless Democrat leaders have completely abdicated their responsibility to protect their citizens. That is why President Trump has signed a Presidential Memorandum deploying 2,000 National Guardsmen to address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester.”

“It’s a very complicated topic,” Professor Paul stated. “Most of the time, when the National Guard is nationalized — unless it’s a situation in which a state is refusing to enforce the federal laws — the president typically waits and gets a request from the governor before going in and doing something like this.”

But California Gov. Gavin Newsom has sued Trump for interfering, stating in his request for an emergency order to block the president’s deployments that “Federal antagonization, through the presence of soldiers in the streets, has already caused real and irreparable damage to the City of Los Angeles, the people who live there, and the State of California. They must be stopped, immediately.”

Newsom may have a point, argues Daniel Pi, a professor at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law. He told WMUR that there are limitations on what the National Guard can be used for, such as local law enforcement purposes.

“This is how democracies falter, is when you start to break down those very important separators, those walls that keep everybody in their lane. And so, yeah, I mean, this is genuinely, I think, a reason to be concerned and worried for the state of our democracy,” Pi said.

The New York Times reported there is still a bit of uncertainty around what statutory authority President Trump cited in his decision “to deploy active-duty Marines to American streets.”

“The Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law, generally prohibits active-duty forces from providing domestic law enforcement unless the president invokes the little-used Insurrection Act. So far he has not done so. In his order federalizing California’s National Guard, Mr. Trump cited Title 10 of the United States Code, which lays out the legal basis for the use of U.S. military forces. His order also referred to ‘the authority vested in me as president by the Constitution,'” the Times reported.

Bernadette Meyler, a professor of constitutional law at Stanford University, told the Associated Press: “I think that the provision that Trump is using is really an exception to the norm.”

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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A scene from the Los Angeles protests over immigration raids with stats on how President Trump has responded / Good Day LA screenshot, YouTube

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