After on Saturday on Saturday, the president performed a telephone with the Governor of Oregon Tina Kotek from what was confused about the call. The cat was “very cute” Trump said In an interview the next day. But she tried her best to convince him not to send him to the National Guard, and this simply had no sense for him. “But I said:“ Well, wait a minute, I watch things on TV, which differ from what is happening? “
A few hours later, the Minister of Defense Pit Hegset released a memorandum federal of 200 members of the Navigon National Guard for deployment in Portland Oregon Quickly filed lawsuit To stop it.
At the hearing on Friday, Oregon and the city of Portland presented arguments about why the federal judge should provide a temporary prohibiting order against Trump. Within about an hour and a half, the appearance of the court was a strange clash of television and reality, Internet messages and established legislative provisions. Both sides turned into a wide strip of the legal territory – the teeth of section 12406, the Law on Posse Comitatus, the law on the administrative procedure, irreparable harm. But the formalized structure of the hearing and the metropolitan environment, covered with wood, could not disguise the obvious madness at the heart of the matter. The lawsuit leads to two things: the “large level of respect”, due to the executive branch in the federalization of the national guard, and the obvious truth that the executive branch is currently completely outside of its pumpkin and publishes it.
There are three teeth 10 USC § 12406In which the circumstances are set out in which the president can cause the National Guard. The first in case of invasion by foreign power. The second is in the event of an uprising. Third – when “the president cannot comply with the laws of the United States with constant forces.”
“The parties are largely concentrated on the 1st diary,” said Judge Karin Immort when the hearing began. “I do not think that someone claimed that we are in the danger of an uprising against the authority of the United States, but the accused can correct me in this.”
As it turned out, the accused, or, rather, the lawyers of the Ministry of Justice, representing the president and Pete Highset, really wanted to say that Portland was on the verge of uprising, saying that protests at the ice plant at the southeast Portland were “deliberate organized resistance to force and weapons” in the United States.
“This standard is so wide that it will swallow a lot of behavior,” said Scott Kennedy against the senior assistant lawyer Oregon. “Most protests are opposed to the authorities.”
But in some way, the statement of the Ministry of Justice that Portland risks getting into an armed uprising was not the most surrealistic part of the hearing. Most of the hearing was devoted to whether preliminary conditions were fulfilled for 1 (the inability to fulfill the US law using “ordinary forces”) – or rather, the president’s determination that this had He was met valid.
When Judge Immort asked the Ministry of Justice how the main source of authority was to determine the president, the deputy assistant to the Prosecutor General Eric Hamilton answered, without the slightest hint of shame, “the most important determination is reflected in the posts that he made in the truth in social.”
Two posts that he quoted were on September 27th And October 1The President intended to authorize the “full force” in the first post with a field in the first post to “protect the war of the destroyed Portland” from “internal terrorists”. The second post is much longer, and although it has a signature of the unstable use of Trump's title letters, its proposals have numerous sentences and correspond to the actual legal provisions. This is a post with Trump's taste, who does not feel at all Trump. On October 1, the post falls into the moron, indicating that he “activated and called for the National Guard service,” because the law enforcement agencies “could not ensure the observance of laws in Oregon”. Oregon claimed that the post on October 1 was inappropriate for consideration, since Hegset released his memorandum on September 28 – a completely reasonable objection, which barely seemed in circumstances.
Hamilton took upon himself to clarify the picture of the zone of military operations, which the president published about. According to him, the ice was under the “vicious and cruel” attacks of the protesters. The cliffs were thrown into ice agents, protesters tried to “blind” ice drivers with flashlights, places for ice vehicles were placed on the Internet, ice agents were doxes, and the most terrible, the ice road drive was sometimes blocked, which prevented changes in the shift. He also quoted the protesters, installing the guillotine on the spot. (No ice agents were guillotized.)
It was remarkable how many “attacks” that he described were actually about messages on the Internet – reports of cars, publications about the identity of ice, posts with “violent threats”, which proved that Portland got out of control. Kennedy noted that “according to his own description of the national guard of the defendant, not one of these things was in the powers of the National Guard.
In addition, not all these things occurred in September or even August. Many date back to June, some in July. “The president’s perception of what is happening in Portland is not what is happening on the ground,” said Caroline Turko, senior deputy city prosecutor. She spent some time, reading excerpts from various declarations of law enforcement agencies that were filed in the lawsuit, especially at night leading to the social posts of Trump, when the Portland police bureau was in contact with the federal protective service, which reported “no problems, no problems.”
Kennedy called the presidential posts “vague incendiary hyperbole, in which there is no conscientious assessment of facts.”
“In the end, we have a problem with perception against reality,” said Turko. “The president thinks that this is the Second World War here. The reality is that it is a beautiful city with complex police forces that can cope with the situation. ”
“Ultimately, we have a problem with perception against reality”
Shadow of 2020 Lried over most of the hearing. The Ministry of Justice wanted to use 2020 protests to support its statements about violence and uprising, but, given the nature of the temporary prohibitive order, the judge did not seem to want to spend so much time, thinking about what happened five years ago. But the lawyers of the state and the city also thought about 2020 – the “federal participation”, according to them, serve only the “inciting” of the situation, leaving Oregon and Portland, holding the bag as fierce protesters for Trump.
And the audience in the courtroom and the hall of the crowded hall also thought about 2020, portlanders dressed in costumes, rain jackets and down jackets, filling the space of this festive, friendly chatter, which is endemic for the north -west of the Pacific Ocean. “Have you been here in 2020?” I overheard one participant, told another in the gallery.
The judge promised to make her decision in the near future, on that day or the next day. She admitted that she was appointed only the previous case – the previous judge Michael Simon refused the day before, finding himself on the demands of the Ministry of Justice. Simon is married to members of the House of Representatives of Suzanne Bonim, which includes part of Portland and some of his suburbs. The new judge, Karin Immort, was appointed Trump in 2019.
When I left the court building on a cold, humid October day, the building looked both new and old for me. I was there many times, in the summer of 2020 – but the court building was and fenced the graffiti and federals in Kamuf. I could see a place where they threw me on the steps excessively diligent Fed in 2020; It was next to a large engraved piece of stone, which I have never seen before, because it was covered with fortifications. In his glossy face, a quote was cut out in his glossy face, with the inscription: “The useless sea of freedom is never without a wave.”
It was a little on the nose, but it was the rest.
