Democrats in Congress 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 U.S. Constitution and all statutes. There are some examples where orders are outright illegal, and a defense of “I was just following orders” makes no sense. One infamous case involved Lieutenant William Calley, who led the horrific My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. However, the Democrats’ call here is staggeringly dangerous and invites a coup.
Senator Slotkin came under fire Tuesday from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth after he shared a video urging troops to disobey “illegal” orders. (Getty Images)
But which orders exactly do Democrats say are illegal? Are ICE raids part of these allegedly unlawful orders? The Supreme Court recently suspended an order by left-wing Los Angeles judge Maame Ewusi Mensah Frimpong that had restricted such raids. In Chicago, Judge Sara Ellis issued a broad injunction against the use of force by ICE officers, but the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the ban, characterizing it as too broad. Two district judges in San Francisco and Portland recently ordered the use of National Guard troops in those cities to protect ICE agents who were attacked. In both cases, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed those rulings. A similar ruling by radical Biden judge April Perry in Chicago is pending at the Supreme Court.
In the first 10 months of the Trump administration, district courts — mostly in left-led cities like D.C., Portland, Chicago, San Francisco and Boston — issued nearly four dozen injunctions against the administration. This number is staggering; it has nearly eclipsed the 64 orders issued during Trump’s first term. Trump can’t even repaint or power wash the Eisenhower Building, an office location for executive branch officials. The ban is in effect until December 31 while a district court hears a lawsuit from two lawyers in a nearby building, claiming they will be harmed in some way by the painting and electricity washing.
Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared Tuesday before a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
The Supreme Court has intervened about 20 times against all these orders. The justices tried to significantly reduce the number of injunctions in Trump v. CASA earlier this year; yet the commandments remain. Trump’s all-star legal team of Attorney General Pam Bondi, Solicitor General John Sauer and many other exceptional lawyers have won more than 90% of their appeals to the Supreme Court. This success rate is extraordinary, and leftists have used this statistic to bash the Supreme Court’s constitutionalist majority. However, their anger is misplaced because the problem is not with the judges, but with the rogue judges who continue to issue absurd orders after absurd orders.
Federal judges who attended top law schools, including Harvard and Yale, have had their court orders overturned time and time again. It is clear that many judges refuse to accept the clear electoral mandate that Trump obtained last November. If these judges, who have had the best legal training our nation has to offer, cannot correctly decide what is and is not lawful Trump action, how can intelligence officials, especially those who are not lawyers, do so? How can teenage soldiers be on the front lines? These Democrats’ message would logically extend even to bureaucrats in departments unrelated to the military.
Recently, left-leaning Biden Massachusetts Judge Julia Kobick ordered the Trump administration’s policy to require the use of one’s biological sex in a passport instead of one’s gender identity. Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court upheld Kobick’s ridiculous order earlier this month in Trump v. Orr. Suppose a bureaucrat had decided before Kobick’s order to refuse to comply with the directive. Would Democrats find this action acceptable? We would have had a situation where a bureaucrat would have violated a lawful order based on the Supreme Court’s stay. Total chaos would ensue if bureaucrats adopted this attitude and decided for themselves which orders to follow and which to ignore. Commandments must be obeyed until they are suspended, but that modest acknowledgment does not give bureaucrats carte blanche to become kings and queens who decide for themselves what the law is.
Anwar Al-Awlaki at the Dar al Hijrah Mosque on October 4, 2001 in Falls Church, Virginia. (Photo by Tracy Woodward/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
During his administration, President Obama issued a controversial order: to use drone strikes to kill Americans abroad who the government believed were terrorists. This practice received the legal stamp of approval from the Office of Legal Counsel, the Department of Justice office that provides advice on legal matters. The author of the consent memorandum was David Barron, who serves as chief judge of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Some scholars vehemently argued that these targeted killings, such as that of Anwar al-Awlaki, were illegal. What would the Democrats who produced this anarchic video have suggested that soldiers on the front lines did when they were ordered to kill? Was Obama’s order legal or illegal? The army rightly obeyed the order, and disobedience would have meant mutiny.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Trump-crazed leftists will do everything they can to thwart Trump’s agenda. We’ve seen four indictments, two impeachments, countless lawsuits, attempts to throw him off the ballot, and assassination attempts. However, this latest stunt is about much more than Trump. If any military official, intelligence officer or bureaucrat in any department disobeys any of Trump’s orders, legal accountability must be swift and strict. This is about the presidency, just like the issue of presidential immunity, as Judge Brett Kavanaugh emphasized during oral arguments in that case. Intelligence and military officials hostile to a Democrat in the White House could cite disobedience to Trump as a precedent for violating orders they unilaterally decide are unlawful. According to Article II, the president is the commander in chief. There are many options for dealing with wayward presidents, such as impeachment. However, the coup proposed by the Democrats is certainly not one of them.
