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Congressional Democrats are openly encouraging anarchy with a new video calling on military and intelligence officials to disobey what they claim are unlawful orders from President Trump. All government officials take an oath to uphold the law, including the United States Constitution and all statutes. There are some examples where orders are plainly unlawful, and a defense of “I was just following orders” is unavailing. An infamous case involved Lt. William Calley, who led the horrific My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. Democrats’ call here, however, is staggeringly dangerous and invites a coup.
But exactly which orders do Democrats believe are unlawful? Are ICE raids part of these supposedly unlawful orders? The Supreme Court recently stayed an order by leftist Judge Maame Ewusi Mensah Frimpong in Los Angeles that had curtailed such raids. In Chicago, Judge Sara Ellis issued a broad injunction against the use of force by ICE officials, but the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals just stayed it, characterizing it as overbroad. Two district judges in San Francisco and Portland recently enjoined the use of National Guard troops in those cities to protect ICE agents who were under attack. In both instances, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed those rulings. A similar ruling by radical Biden Judge April Perry in Chicago is pending before the Supreme Court.
In the first 10 months of the Trump administration, district courts—mostly in leftist-run cities like D.C., Portland, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston—have issued nearly four dozen injunctions against the government. This number is staggering; it has almost eclipsed the 64 injunctions issued during Trump’s first term. Trump cannot even repaint or power wash the Eisenhower Building, an office location for Executive Branch officials. The prohibition is effective through Dec. 31, while a district court considers a lawsuit by two lawyers in a nearby building claiming that they somehow will be harmed by the painting and the power washing.
The Supreme Court has already intervened about two dozen times in the face of all of these injunctions. The justices attempted to diminish the volume of injunctions significantly in Trump v. CASA earlier this year; yet, the injunctions persist. Trump’s all-star legal team of Attorney General Pam Bondi, Solicitor General John Sauer and many other exceptional attorneys have won over 90% of their appeals to the Supreme Court. This success rate is extraordinary, and leftists have used this statistic to bash the constitutionalist Supreme Court majority. Their anger is misplaced, however, for the problem is not the justices but rather the rogue judges who continue to issue absurd injunction after absurd injunction.
Federal judges who have attended the finest law schools, including Harvard and Yale, have had their injunctions overturned time and again. It is obvious that many judges refuse to accept the clear electoral mandate that Trump secured last November. If these judges, having had the best legal education our nation has to offer, cannot decide correctly what are and are not lawful actions by Trump, how can intelligence officials, especially those who are not lawyers? How can teenage soldiers on the front line? The message from these Democrats logically would extend even to bureaucrats in departments that have nothing to do with the military.
Recently, leftist Biden Massachusetts Judge Julia Kobick enjoined the Trump administration’s policy of requiring the use of one’s biological sex on a passport instead of one’s gender identity. Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court stayed Kobick’s ludicrous injunction earlier this month in Trump v. Orr. Suppose a bureaucrat, prior to Kobick’s injunction, had decided to refuse to comply with the directive. Would Democrats find this action acceptable? We would have had a situation where a bureaucrat would have contravened a lawful order, based on the Supreme Court’s stay. Utter chaos would erupt were bureaucrats to adopt this stance of deciding for themselves which orders to follow and which to disregard. Injunctions should be obeyed until stayed, but that modest acknowledgment does not give bureaucrats carte blanche to become kings and queens who decide what the law is for themselves.
During his administration, President Obama gave a controversial order: to use drone strikes to kill Americans overseas who were, according to the administration, terrorists. This practice received the legal stamp of approval from the Office of Legal Counsel, the Justice Department office that opines on legal issues. The author of the approving memorandum was David Barron, who serves as chief judge of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Some scholars argued vehemently that these targeted killings, such as that of Anwar al-Awlaki, were unlawful. What would the Democrats producing this anarchic video have suggested that soldiers on the front lines have done when given the order to kill? Was Obama’s order lawful, or was it unlawful? The military rightly obeyed the order, and disobedience would have constituted mutiny.
Trump-deranged leftists will stop at nothing to thwart Trump’s agenda. We have seen four indictments, two impeachments, countless lawsuits, attempts to throw him off of ballots, and assassination attempts. This latest stunt, however, is about much more than Trump. If any military official, intelligence official, or bureaucrat in any department ignores one of Trump’s orders, there must be swift and severe legal accountability. This is about the presidency, just like the issue of presidential immunity, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh emphasized during the oral argument of that case. Intelligence and military officials hostile to a Democrat in the White House could cite disobedience of Trump as a precedent for violating orders that they unilaterally decide are unlawful. Per Article II, the president is the commander-in-chief. There are many recourses to deal with wayward presidents, such as impeachment. The Democrat-proposed coup, however, most certainly is not one of them.
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