The 7th Circuit rejects lies about Chicago

The MAGA Supreme Court must not condone Trump’s lies

Donald Trump, his MAGA lackeys, and the captured right-wing media continue to perpetrate a lie that American cities are war zones where local police are overwhelmed, riots rage, and “the worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants necessitate a brutal, violent onslaught from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Trump’s white Christian nationalist base (which is significantly rural and small-town) gobbles that up. Trump, however, has run into trouble peddling that fiction in federal courts. Government lawyers repeatedly have presented blatantly false justifications for federalizing and deploying National Guard troops under 10 U.S.C.§ 1240. That statute allows nationalization only if there is an invasion/danger of invasion, rebellion/danger of rebellion, or if “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

It is one thing for Trump and his dissembling minions to make up (or ignore) facts to erect a blatantly false narrative while on friendly MAGA media turf; it is quite another to defend invasions in U.S. cities based on dissembling in sworn declarations to federal judges. Multiple courts have ruled that this government’s declarations are “unreliable,” meaning they were either lies to mislead courts or mistakes that government lawyers used to try to persuade courts to allow Trump’s invasions. Those lawyers either negligently or intentionally proffered false statements to defend Trump’s effort to militarize our cities.

(Paul Goyette via Wikimedia Commons)

The latest collision between Trump’s misrepresentations and reality came in a unanimous 7^th Circuit per curium opinion upholding the U.S. District Court’s opinion finding that there was no legal basis for National Guard deployment in Chicago. (On the three-person panel, one judge was appointed by Trump, another by George H.W. Bush, and the third by Barack Obama.) The court acknowledged that, though deference is owed to the executive, it must not turn a blind eye to a blatantly false portrayal of events. Put differently: Government lies to the country will not fly in court.

The court put the Chicago protests in perspective. “According to Broadview Police, the crowd has never exceeded 200, though the administration suggests it may once have reached around 300,” the judges reminded us. Translation: The apocalyptic vision Trump invents to justify a massive crackdown on civil liberties is spun out of whole cloth.

When ICE deployed pepper spray and tear gas (against unarmed protestors) on Sept. 26, “[S]tate police and other local police departments sent six cars. The activity near the facility closed a nearby road for roughly five hours, but Illinois law enforcement was able to contain the scene,” the court reiterated. The next week, a few dozen protestors showed up, but “State and local law enforcement quickly responded and controlled the scene. DHS did not have to intervene.”

That was reality. The court dismissed as unreliable the Trump regime’s contradictory assertions (in sworn declarations signed under penalty of perjury), finding that they “omitted material information or were undermined by independent, objective evidence.” The court, in other words, refused to accept Trump’s fictitious narrative.

In making its finding, the 7^th Circuit panel distinguished between “rebellion” (one legal basis justifying deployment of the National Guard) and constitutionally protected protest:

A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest.

The court emphasized that a few violent perpetrators whom local police handle do not erase the “considerable daylight between protected speech and rebellion.” The court therefore concluded, “The spirited, sustained, and occasionally violent actions of demonstrators in protest of the federal government’s immigration policies and actions, without more, does not give rise to a danger of rebellion against the government’s authority.”

Then, turning to the other phony justification (the federal government was unable to enforce the laws), the court found that, too, was factually wrong. “Even applying great deference to the administration’s view of the facts, under the facts as found by the district court, there is insufficient evidence that protest activity in Illinois has significantly impeded the ability of federal officers to execute federal immigration laws.” Federal facilities remained open, local authorities contained “sporadic disruptions,” and deportations and arrests continued as “the administration has been proclaiming the success of its current efforts to enforce immigration laws in the Chicago area.”

The Trump regime has appealed to the Supreme Court, hoping that MAGA justices will again undermine lower courts that rejected lies about “war ravaged” cities. If the MAGA justices again undo lower courts’ fact-finding and allow Trump to invade U.S. cities, they effectively will have given Trump wide berth to lie. That would not only further distort the separation of powers (granting unlimited deference to the executive branch) but also signal that there is no price to be paid legally or professionally for government lawyers’ deceiving courts. (Lawyers who knowingly solicited or presented false declarations should face legal and professional accountability.)

Lower courts already are up in arms, condemning the MAGA justices’ terse emergency docket edicts disregarding their findings of facts. Trial courts are in the business of determining facts, applying the law to them, upholding the integrity of the judicial system, and sustaining the confidence of the parties and public that the truth will come out. If none of that matters, why have lower courts? The better question is why we should grant far-ranging appellate jurisdiction to lifetime Supreme Court justices who would systematically dismantle the separation of powers and undermine the entire federal bench.

If we want to return to a system of laws, we must address MAGA justices’ gross damage to the Constitution and to the credibility of lower courts. That might require everything from Supreme Court expansion to curtailing its appellate jurisdiction. For voters concerned about preventing a full-scale descent into fascism, the Supreme Court must be a top priority.

---