Trump Meets a Friendly Audience in Court as He Seeks To Deploy Military Wherever He Wants

There was a contentious hearing Thursday on President Trump's call to deploy National Guard troops to blue states that don't want them there.

In a San Francisco courtroom, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel, dominated by Trump appointees, sounded so supportive of his case that one reporter he knew wondered whether the arguments were duplicate wiretaps before the Supreme Court. The hearing focused on a district court ruling preventing the Guard from being sent to Portland.

“The president can direct his resources as he sees fit, and it seems a little counterintuitive to me that the city of Portland could come in and say, 'No, you need to do this differently,'” Judge Ryan Nelson, one of Trump's appointees, said Thursday. “I understand there is a law here and we'll have to review it, but it's about the level of respect that I think the president is entitled to in these circumstances. And it's not all driven by what we see on the streets, it's also driven to some extent by what's going on behind the scenes that you don't have a full understanding of.”

And in Chicago, the city and state made the case for rejecting Trump's appointment in district court (in a courtroom without remote access – to which we say “ew”). During the hearing, Biden-nominated judge April Perry called the city's protests an “insurrection” – one of the criteria for sending the Guard under Title 10 of the law cited by the administration – “brazen.” for the NBC affiliate in Chicago.

(Update: Perry is temporarily blocked Trump's deployment in an order late Thursday.)

“What if the DHS guys aren't grounded in reality? Does it matter?” she said, asking, “Who are the rebels” and “are they well armed?”

She also reportedly pressed Justice Department officials on where exactly the Guard would be stationed.

Perry refused to immediately block the Guard's deployment when she received the case and troops arrived in the city.

Samantha vs Mike Johnson

Samantha called from Fort Belvoir, Virginia. collided Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Los Angeles), taking calls from CPSAN on Thursday, told him that her military family, including two “medically dangerous children,” would be hit hard if her husband missed a paycheck due to the shutdown.

“If we see lost wages on the 15th, my kids won't be able to get the medications they need to live a normal life because we're living paycheck to paycheck,” she said, adding that her “kids could die.”

“As a Republican, I'm very disappointed in my party, and I'm very disappointed in you because you have the power to recall the House of Representatives—you refuse to do it just for show,” she said. “The courage of someone who makes six figures a year to do this to military families is insane.”

Johnson responded that stories like hers “keep him up at night” and blamed the shutdown on Democrats.

“Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are stopping your family from getting the help they need, not the Republicans, and my heart goes out to you,” he said.

Dozens of House Democrats are signing a letter to Johnson demanding a separate vote on military pay. for politics.

Katie Porter's hellish news cycle continues

Gubernatorial candidate and former Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) continues to pay for her ugliness on camera in response to rather lame but reassuring questions from a local CBS reporter. After being asked in a video Tuesday night how she would win over Trump voters in the state, she became angry.

“I feel like this is unnecessarily controversial, what is your question?” she snapped, before saying, “I don’t want to keep doing this, I want to call it.”

She ultimately stayed until the end of the interview, according to her campaign.

This episode was especially stupid because when she briefly stopped criticizing the questions and actually answered them, she had an absolutely perfect answer. She said her experience representing Orange County has given her a bona fides in winning over Republican voters that her primary rivals in the state's bluer pockets don't have.

I realize that on a meta level it is very annoying that a gubernatorial candidate in, say, Texas will never be asked how he “intends to win over Harris voters” – a classic example of the ingrained news bias in which Democrats are expected to be conciliatory adults to the opposing party, while Republicans can freely brush them off and hurl insults at them. But come on. Threatening to walk out of an interview on camera only increases the incentive for reporters to ask these kinds of questions.

And then the tap opened. Someone leaked Politico a clip Wednesday in which she berates an employee during a video call to “get out of my damn frame!”

As Operation Steal the House Before the Vote approaches

Vice President J.D. Vance travels to Indiana to set fire to the back of a state legislature unwilling to redraw congressional maps to guarantee Republicans more seats. according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle. The state delegation is currently 7-2 Republican.

Vance visited the country in August to persuade legislative leaders to support the initiative, but they made no firm commitments after the meeting.

They don't appear to share the convictions of Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who told Politico in September, “They killed Charlie Kirk—the least we can do is go through the legal process and redistrict Indiana from nine to zero.”

Meanwhile, efforts are underway in Missouri to put a referendum on the 2026 ballot so voters can weigh in on a new gerrymandered map, and that's making some Republicans nervous. per punch bowl. The delegation is currently 6-2 Republican, but the new map will make Rep. Emanual Cleaver's (D-Mo.) Kansas City district a safe Republican district.

While the Missouri Legislature passed the new amended map, it also passed an amendment that, wildly coincidentally, would make it more difficult for citizen initiatives to appear on the ballot in the future.