October 11, 2025

Can President Trump Deploy The National Guard To Portland Or Chicago?

October 11, 2025/ Francis Menton

The first nine months of the second Trump administration have seen extraordinary litigation efforts by opponents of the government seeking to block its initiatives of every sort.
This page at Lawfare Media tracks some 190 active cases challenging Trump administration actions; and I don’t think that that list of 190 is comprehensive. The cases cover subject matter areas ranging from spending reductions to employee terminations to migrant deportations to regulatory actions, among many others.
Those following these litigations, or some of them, have undoubtedly noticed a pattern whereby a District Court judge, usually in a blue state, enjoins the administration’s action, only to have that injunction stayed by a Court of Appeals or by the Supreme Court within a few days or weeks. This pattern has been repeated multiple times in areas including spending reductions and migrant deportations.
Although none of the cases has yet reached full merits review at the Supreme Court, nevertheless there is a growing sense of District Court judges going beyond their job of enforcing the law, and instead seeking to supplant legitimate executive authority with their own policy preferences.
The latest series of cases involves the efforts of President Trump to deploy units of the National Guard to Portland and Chicago to support the efforts of ICE in those cities to enforce the federal immigration laws.

September 30, 2025

Biggest Hogwash Of The Week: Justice Department Independence From Politics

September 30, 2025/ Francis Menton

Late Friday afternoon (September 26) the U.S. Justice Department filed an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The indictment is extremely brief — barely one page of text — and focuses only on a single statement made by Comey in sworn Congressional testimony given on September 30, 2020, which statement is alleged in the indictment to be false.
Note that essentially every other commentator on this subject is in the same position that I am in of not being able to make a full analysis of the merits of the indictment. That has not prevented the usual suspects from criticizing President Trump for pushing for the indictment. To some degree, I agree with these criticisms, or at least I am sympathetic to them, to the extent that they criticize the President for seeking to use the justice system to get back at his political enemies.
But then, seemingly in each case, the critics go farther, and assert that with this indictment President Trump has done something totally new and different, and has entirely broken or transformed (or maybe “trampled on”) the former longstanding and proper norms of the Justice Department of never, ever abusing the justice system to attack political opponents. These assertions are not potentially appropriate criticism, but rather are complete hogwash.

September 20, 2025

September 20, 2025/ Francis Menton

The four years of the Biden presidency were a terrible low point for the protection of freedom of speech in the U.S. A web of government agencies and allied NGOs sprang up with remarkable rapidity to identify and ban disfavored speech, almost always of conservatives.
As just a few examples: the White House itself pressured social media platforms to suppress disfavored speech on politically sensitive topics like Covid and climate change; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency collaborated with universities and NGOs like the Stanford Internet Observatory to get disfavored speech banned or suppressed; the Department of Homeland Security formed a Disinformation Governance Board to coerce social media companies to suppress speech deemed “disinformation”; and the FBI conducted wide-ranging investigations of Republican politicians and organizations.
The entire enterprise got the accurate nickname of the Censorship Industrial Complex.
This was an extremely important issue that drove many voters to Trump. After Trump was elected, we had every reason to expect that efforts like those of the prior administration to coerce the suppression of opponents’ speech of would come to an end. And, for the most part, they have.
However, the past week has seen two bad unforced errors on the freedom of speech front by high-ranking members of the Trump administration:

September 05, 2025

September 05, 2025/ Francis Menton

By some strange coincidence, no sooner did I write yesterday’s post about the thoroughly corrupt CDC and its recently-fired Director, Susan Monarez, than there turns up in today’s Wall Street Journal an op-ed by the same Ms. Monarez trying to justify herself and the agency with regard to HHS Secretary RFK, Jr.
The headline is “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC and Me.” The sub-headline (online edition only) is “I was fired after 29 days because I held the line and insisted on rigorous scientific review.” The article is behind the Journal’s paywall, so I will provide some substantial quotes.
The theme of the piece, well-summarized in the sub-headline, is that Ms. Monarez, with the help of CDC colleagues, was fired for trying to hold the line against “pressure to compromise science itself.”

September 04, 2025

September 04, 2025/ Francis Menton

Last week the newly-confirmed head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Susan Monarez, was abruptly fired by President Trump, barely a month after receiving her Senate confirmation in July. Although Monarez was new to CDC as of the second Trump term, her career in high-level government positions runs back to through the Biden, Trump I, and Obama administrations.
Upon announcement of Monarez’s firing, the press was immediately filled with reports of “turmoil” at the agency. At least four other high-ranking officials resigned in protest. In addition, large numbers of staffers came forward (anonymously) to complain of the supposedly “anti-science” approach being taken by Trump and his HHS Secretary, RFK, Jr.
Do you have the impression that CDC is a useful agency, “following the science” and protecting the public health? If so, you haven’t been paying attention to the news for the past several years (or more).

August 30, 2025

August 30, 2025/ Francis Menton

One of the signature initiatives of President Trump’s second term has been what I have called the “tariff gambit” — the rapid blizzard of tariff actions, including declarations of emergencies, tariff impositions, increases and decreases in rates, postponements, and negotiations of new trade deals with various countries.
In several prior posts, including here and here, I have raised a series of concerns with this area of the President’s policies.
Putting aside for a moment the question of whether these various tariff initiatives constitute good public policy, a separate question is whether the President has a legal basis to impose, raise and lower tariffs on his own authority, even if he declares a “national emergency.”