A few days ago, perhaps in the first flush of outrage about news that federal agents have been arresting Portland demonstrators without informing them of their identity and tossing them into unmarked vans, Never Trumper and former John McCain advisor Steve Schmidt tweeted that, “The Governor of Oregon should deploy the State Police and the National Guard to arrest on site [sic] any heavily armed Paramilitary forces who are operating without ID’s, Badges and snatching Americans off of the street and stuffing them into unmarked vehicles. [. . .] We are watching a Secret Police forming before our eyes and it is both an abomination and unacceptable.”
I’m finding it notable that Schmidt’s comments have not been echoed more widely, even as I can also understand why. For reasons that I assume even Schmidt would concede, one strong (but hardly the only) reason why a Democratic governor like Kate Brown would decline to send in the National Guard and state police to address federal lawlessness is because in matters of force, the federal government could easily re-gain the upper hand, given that the president is commander-in-chief and controls the U.S. military. There is also the not-small matter of being the governor who ends up getting accused of trying to start a civil war. This isn’t to say I’m not sympathetic to Schmidt’s sentiments — to the contrary, I believe that members of the CBP and other federal security agency are following illegitimate orders and acting unconstitutionally, and deserve to lose their jobs and be banned from future government employment.
But I think the deeper question that Schmidt raises is important to consider — not specifically whether to risk a civil war-style shootout between federal and state officers, but what state and local governments are actually obligated to do to protect their citizens from a federal force that is acting, for all intents and purposes, like a secret police force accountable not to the law but to President Trump. Right now, Oregon officials’ strategy is both to publicize and to denounce the federal presence, and to use the law and legislation against the feds. The state attorney general has filed a lawsuit against federal agencies, while in Congress Democratic senators are working on legislation to constrain the Department of Homeland Security from such deployments. But if the federal depredations continue, and escalate, despite these actions (and will such a bill really make it through a GOP-majority Senate?) then like it or not, state and local officials would indeed be derelict in their duty not to take stronger measures to stop this activity.
The trick to doing so is that, as I started off saying, the risks of escalating a conflict with the federal government are mind-bogglingly dangerous when a corrupt and amoral man like Donald Trump is commander-in-chief. It is not hard to see a scenario in which, to use Schmidt’s example, the governor’s deployment of the National Guard to halt federal abuses results in Donald Trump assuming control of the Oregon National Guard, and in turn deploying it to assist the federal agents in conducting their illicit suppression of protests; or, more nightmarishly, sending in the 82nd Airborne Division to enforce order in the city as the president fantasized about doing in Washington, D.C. We are very much in a situation where the president is looking for excuses to escalate his behavior; the seeming conundrum is that his behavior requires a response that will also deny him the opening for an escalation.
Yesterday, David Roberts of Vox raised a related issue, writing, “How long until we see the first violent clash between federal agents operating in US cities and the police forces of those cities? And what happens then?” Roberts’ tweet was generally hammered on Twitter by respondents who saw it as nonsensical to think that the police would ever be in conflict with federal agents. But Roberts wasn’t suggesting that the police are some sort of benign force that would stop the feds out of the goodness of their hearts; his observation encompasses both the possibility of an accidental conflict or one resulting from direct orders of city authorities to counter illegal activities by federal agents. Even here in Portland, where there is strong evidence that the police have been operating in coordination with federal officers despite the mayor’s instructions not to, the feds and the city police are all responding to demonstrations often literally within a block of each other; accidents could surely happen (and the avoidance of such may be one way police are justifying themselves whatever coordination they have with the federal forces). But the other possibility — that police could come into conflict with federal agents, say, by attempting to prevent them from performing an illegal arrest — can’t just be waved away by declaring that all cops are bastards and that this would never happen. In fact, this issue just became a lot more concrete, as yesterday President Trump declared his intention to expand the DHS deployments to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia. In response, Philadelphia’s district attorney stated that he would charge with assault any federal officers who assault or kidnap people in that city. Again, as with Schmidt’s call for state action against offending federal agents, it is hard to see how such a move would not be used by the president to escalate whatever federal presence Philadelphia is unlucky enough to receive.
But the probability that such a move, akin to Schmidt’s example of calling out the National Guard in Oregon, would provoke a presidential escalation isn’t the same as saying that state or local officials shouldn’t take such actions. What it does mean is that if they do so, they need to be prepared for what steps they might take when the federal government responds. No one should ever lose sight of the broader context — that the president is acting as an authoritarian, deploying illegal force against social justice protestors in an attempt to create a fictional narrative of a nation under attack, all in the name of rescuing his reelection campaign from its apparent death spiral. He is forcing state and local officials to consider acts of resistance against federal intrusions that no legitimate president would force them to.
Yet local and state officials have an obligation to resist, and to protect their citizenry from lawlessness, wherever that lawlessness comes from. And in turn, it’s absolutely essential that the citizenry demand such protection from their local governments. Hold their feet to the fire; make it clear to them that they must address these fraught and unprecedented questions. Crucially, no effort to resist these deployments is happening in a vacuum. Just as state officials are obliged to act decisively, congressional Democrats are as well — and some are, with Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and others proposing legislation to curb deployments of federal agents to American cities. House Democrats, in control of that chamber of Congress, also have an immense amount of power to block funding to the Department of Homeland Security and beyond until this presidential lawlessness ends.
In turn, mass non-violent demonstrations in Portland against the federal presence would give the lie to the president’s propaganda about the nature of the protests he seeks to suppress. Already, we are seeing how an infusion of fresh protestors is helping to highlight the violence and inappropriateness of the federal tactics; this weekend saw both protesting mothers and a Navy veteran gassed and beaten, respectively.
Hitting the president’s actions on such multiple fronts can help rob the force and violence he wields of any possible legitimacy, by making it look disproportionate, lawless, and absurd. Conversely, protestors backed up by Congress and state officials gain an additional legitimacy from sympathetic legislative action, while those government officials can point to mass resistance to support their anti-authoritarian proposals. And always, keep in the forefront of public attention the central fact that the president is attempting to use violence to advance his re-election effort by attacking anti-racist, social justice protests; is in fact using violence to advance authoritarian rule and white supremacist ideology.