Appeals Court hounds Californias attorney seeking to scrap Trumps National Guard order

A panel of appeals court judges poked holes in some of California’s core arguments in its bid to scrap President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles.Members of the three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments Tuesday over the Trump administration’s petition for a stay to halt a lower court judge’s order for the president to relinquish control of the California National Guard back to Democratic Gov.Gavin Newsom.While judges on the panel dropped few definitive hints about which direction they were actually leaning, the bulk of their questions appeared to go against California.“Where does the statute say that issuing it through the governor requires either the governor’s consent, requires consultation with the governor? Where in the text do you take that from?” Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, asked at one point.The statute Trump invoked to federalize California’s National Guard earlier this month to contain rioting in Los Angeles stipulates that, “orders for these purposes shall be issued through the governors.”California’s supervising deputy solicitor general, Samuel Harbourt, argued that language inherently means that Newsom needed to be consulted or that “at a minimum,” needed to be apprised.

“Under their view, they can just do the whole process without consulting the governor at all, and then slap his name at the top of the document,” Harbourt argued of the Trump administration’s position.Bennett then floated the possibility that the panel may disagree with that interpretation and view the statutory phrasing “through the governors” as a “ministerial task,” while pressing whether there are other technical issues that could arise.“It’s a very roundabout way of imposing a consultation requirement,” Judge Eric Miller, another Trump appointee, remarked at one point about the language of that statute.

The statute in question laid out three ...