Appeals court must assess legality of troop deployment in Portland

On Thursday morning, three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit – including two appointed by President Trump – will hear arguments on whether the president has unlimited authority to deploy troops, even in American cities, or whether Mr. Trump has become “detached from the facts.”

At issue is the legality of Mr. Trump’s effort to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., which the White House on Tuesday called a “wasteland of firebombing, beatings and brazen attacks” but which another Trump-appointed judge, Karin Immergut, said was no such thing.

Judge Immergut of the federal district court in Oregon temporarily blocked Mr. Trump from deploying troops to Portland, ruling over the weekend that he had most likely exceeded his authority under federal law. This law authorizes the president to call the National Guard in the event of “rebellion or danger of rebellion.”

In a scathing opinion, Judge Immergut wrote that Mr. Trump’s assessment of the situation on the ground “was simply not related to the facts.”

In their appeal, government lawyers relied on an 1827 Supreme Court case to argue that courts do not have the authority to review Mr. Trump’s decisions about when to deploy the National Guard. Questioning “the military judgments of the commander in chief,” they wrote, citing the 1827 decision, “is something for which the district courts have neither the authority nor the jurisdiction to do.”

The call will stand in opposition to growing rhetoric from Mr Trump, who has called US cities “war zones” and called for Democratic officials to be jailed. As it moves through the appeals process, the case could also prove to be a test for the Supreme Court, which in its tentative rulings has largely given way to Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the power of the presidency in other areas, including withholding spending approved by Congress and the power to fire heads of independent agencies.