Constitution? What constitution?
“The only threat we face is to our democracy – and it is being led by President Donald Trump,” declared Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek (D), after a federal court issued a restraining order against Donald Trump’s call to deploy 200 National Guard troops to Portland.
“This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” wrote U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee.
Immergut said Trump’s decision to enlist members of Oregon’s National Guard was based on false claims about nightly unrest targeting federal immigration authorities and buildings in Portland. Though Trump described the city as “war-ravaged” and wracked with violence, police said immigration-related protests had been small, manageable and largely peaceful in the days leading up to Trump’s pronouncement.
“These incidents are inexcusable, but they are nowhere near the type of incidents that cannot be handled by regular law enforcement forces,” Immergut wrote.
The president is due a great deal of deference, Immergut writes, “in his determination that he ‘is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.’” But she finds that Trump lacked a “colorable basis” for invoking his authority under federal law. “The president’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.”
Trump’s lizard brain is “simply untethered to” his frontal lobes. It has been suggested that Trump’s image of Portland stems from Fox News using in its recent coverage b-roll footage from George Floyd protests from 2020. But as his recent United Nations speech revealed (unsurprisingly), Trump holds grudges for decades. He criticized the U.N. for not accepting his bid to renovate the complex 20 years ago. He likely resents Portland for not bowing before him five years ago.
Like Chauncey Gardiner, Trump mainly knows what he sees on TV.
Per Elon Musk’s Grok, Trump has never visited the city:
The New York Times adds:
In her ruling, Judge Immergut wrote that she expected a trial court to agree with the state’s contention that the president exceeded his constitutional authority in mobilizing federal troops for local work and likely violated the 10th Amendment.
Constitution? He don’t need no stinking constitution.
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