Top court nixes Trump’s latest invasion of a Democratic US city

In a ruling that lands with the weight of a foundry door slamming shut, the highest court in the land has delivered a resounding and temporary no to a president who sought to march soldiers onto the streets of an American city.

The scene was Chicago, the request was urgent, and the answer, for now, is that the spectacle cannot proceed.

The Supreme Court, in an unsigned order that reads like a patient schoolmaster correcting a reckless pupil, declared the government had simply “failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.”

So much for the bluster; the parchment, it seems, remains unimpressed by the performance.

This was to be the first act in a national drama of the president’s own devising, a campaign to flood what he calls Democratic-led cities with federalized Guard troops, a solution in search of a rebellion.

The administration cried that federal immigration agents in Chicago were operating in a “climate of constant fear,” that a “rebellion against federal authority” was afoot, a tale so lurid it would make a dime novelist blush.

Yet, when asked to produce the legal foundation for such a martial response, the government presented a curious invention: they argued the law allowing the president to call up the Guard when unable to use “regular forces” referred not to the army, but to civilian lawmen.

The court, with what one imagines was a collective arching of eyebrows, dismissed the tyrannical plea as nonsense.

“Regular forces,” they reminded everyone, means the military. And since the military is famously barred from acting as a police force on American soil, the president’s power here is, and likely ever shall be, vanishingly small.

Three justices, the usual suspects in the dissenting chorus, would have let the march proceed.

But the majority, including a surprising concurrence from the conservative side, saw the precipice for what it was.

They have temporarily upheld a lower court’s finding that spirited, even violent, protest is not, in fact, a rebellion.

It is, rather, the messy and cacophonous sound of a people disagreeing with their government—a noise protected, however inconveniently, by the very framework the executive branch is sworn to uphold.

The implications are as plain as a pikestaff.

This ruling, though preliminary, is a stark rejection of the notion that a president may conjure a crisis to justify turning a citizen-soldier into a political prop.

It repudiates the idea that “Operation Midway Blitz” or the protests it inflamed can be used as a pretext to sidestep two centuries of careful separation between soldier and sheriff.

From Portland to Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., this same troubling script has been met with similar skepticism from the bench, with judges appointed by presidents of both parties seeing the overreach for what it is.

And what are we left with?

A petty tyrannical president whose justification crumbled under the first real scrutiny of the highest court, a court that has too often nodded along but this time drew a line.

We are left with the image of troops idling in limbo, ordered up for a duty the law may never permit. We are left with the sobering truth that the most dangerous rebellion in this affair may not be in the streets of Chicago, but in the relentless imagination of an administration eager to redefine the limits of its own power.

For now, at least, the republic’s ancient guards—parchment, precedent, and a majority of nine—have stood their ground. And that, in this peculiar moment, passes for news of the most reassuring kind.