Elected Democrats have every right, indeed, they have a duty, to conduct oversight over the president’s use of the military to defend the nation. But what they may not do is encourage service members to disobey orders they don’t like, and that is what Sens. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Reps. Jason Crow (D-CO), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chris Deluzio (D-PA), and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) did last week. It was a disgraceful and foolish thing to do.
In a one-minute and thirty-second video posted to social media, these elected Democrats, each of whom either served in the military or intelligence community, spoke “directly to the members of the military and intelligence community,” urging them to “refuse illegal orders.” They did this without identifying any illegal orders that had been given.
Pressed on This Week to identify which illegal orders she was referring to, Slotkin admitted, “I am not aware of things that are illegal,” but added, “there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes and everything related to Venezuela.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who was not featured in the video, was also called on to defend what amounts to the Democratic Party’s effort to subvert the authority of the commander in chief. On Meet the Press, she similarly failed to identify any illegal orders but added, “Some of the judges have now found in certain cities that it is not legal to send in the National Guard.”
It is true that some federal judges have issued decisions holding that President Donald Trump does not have the legal authority to deploy the National Guard to select cities, including Washington, Portland, Oregon, Memphis, Tennessee, and Los Angeles. One appeals court has upheld the trial judge’s determination that the deployment was not authorized by statute. But another federal appeals court, in California, held that Trump had every right to deploy the National Guard to Portland in light of violent attacks on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in that city.
The litigation in both cases is ongoing and will probably reach the Supreme Court. That is how this dispute should be settled, by lawyers before a judge in a court of law. But that is not what reckless Democrats are preaching. They want to imply that Trump is issuing illegal orders as though it is up to Private Joe Blow to decide whether his commander-in-chief’s instructions pass legal muster. The Democrats are telling individual members of each National Guard unit to decide for themselves whether they believe Trump has the authority to deploy them when he, as president, sees fit. That is not how our system works. The Democrats know it, but they evidently do not care.
If National Guard members were being ordered to shoot civilians, that would be one thing. But they are not. That is why Slotkin and Klobuchar failed to specify any illegal orders — not one — because no such blatantly illegal orders have been given. If the president has exceeded his authority, which we doubt, it is by a narrow and debatable margin, not something so obvious that mutiny is the proper course of action. Slotkin may not agree with the “legal gymnastics” being used to justify the bombing of drug traffickers in the Caribbean, but it is her job as a senator to conduct oversight over those strikes, not solicit disobedience from service members on the front lines.
EDITORIAL: TRUMP’S PAINFUL BUT NECESSARY MASS DEPORTATIONS
Civilian control of the military depends on elected leaders engaging properly in the legal process, not urging rank-and-file troops to freelance their own interpretations of presidential authority. By suggesting service members should substitute personal judgment for the chain of command, Democrats are eroding a foundational norm that has kept America stable through far fiercer political storms. If they believe the president’s actions are unlawful, their recourse is to the courts, to oversight hearings, and to statutory reform — not to social media videos aimed at soldiers.
Encouraging individual service members to decide which orders feel legitimate invites chaos, politicizes the armed forces, and threatens to fracture the institution Americans rely on in moments of crisis. There are no illegal orders here, just Democrats unwilling to accept that constitutional disputes must be resolved in courtrooms, not military barracks. Their recklessness endangers the principle they claim to defend.
