National Guard & Federalism

The article recounts how Democratic attorneys general in California, Oregon and Illinois waged a coordinated, largely behind‑the‑scenes legal campaign that culminated in a recent Supreme Court ruling against the Trump administration’s federalization and deployment of National Guard units over their governors’ objections. After Trump sent more than 4,000 California Guard members and Marines into downtown Los Angeles in June 2025 to “protect” immigration officers during protests—citing a little‑used 19th‑century statute, 10 U.S.C. § 12406—the same mechanism was invoked to deploy Guard troops into other Democratic‑led cities despite crime data and lower‑court findings that undercut White House claims of rampant violence. Anticipating such moves even before Trump’s reelection, blue‑state AGs spent months researching the sparse case law, sharing drafts and strategy in real time to attack the administration’s novel reading of §12406 and to frame the issue as a constitutional overreach into state control of their own Guard units. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court sided with Illinois in a key case, prompting Trump to pull hundreds of federalized Guard troops out of California, Oregon and Illinois and marking the first major high‑court rebuke of his second‑term domestic military deployments. The piece underscores that, beyond viral protest imagery and Trump’s social‑media rhetoric, it was technical federalism doctrine and emergency litigation that ultimately checked the president’s claimed authority to put troops on U.S. streets without state consent.