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Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

He calls the National Guard "federal troops". Just a quick chime in, the National Guard is a bit of a misnomer. The Guard reports to and takes orders from the governor of the state, in this case the state of California. Maybe they are "kinda" federal, but the only times I've ever heard the Guard activated are by the governors of various states. Yes, this is talking about someone calling for Trump to activate them, and I get that this guy is outraged over it. That's okay. Just wanted to add to the discussion.

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They wouldn’t be deploying California Guard to California. They would use Arkansas, Louisiana or Texas Guard. The California governor would be uninvolved, but the guard is legally restricted to only protecting Federal assets in this kind of deployment.

"Federal assets" like federal "law" enforcement agents and federally-chartered cattle traincars.

Personally I think state governors should be preemptively deploying their own National Guards to protect their citizens' Constitutional rights against this out of control federal executive. With neither Congress nor the Supreme Council doing their jobs, the states have become the remaining check against rampant federal lawlessness.

Trump is currently exploring how (not "if") he can activate the US Insurrection Act of 1807. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807) and he wants to do it as quickly as possible.

https://www.msnbc.com/news/news-analysis/trump-national-guar...

If he does he can (and will) federalize all National Guard units so they in fact become "federal troops" and this can (and will) allow his "own" federal military through Hegseth to deploy and operate domestically. Additionally he can declare a portion of the US population "insurrectionists" and act upon it, without interference of local law enforcement and government (and the risk of also labeled the same if they do).

As a European with quite some knowledge about European history hopefully I do not have to take a history book and explain the repercussions of Trump doing this?

There are multiple statutory routes to activate the NG, and nearly every time Trump has done so, it has been through a “federalized” route. Even red-state governors have requested this because it transfers the financial and legal obligations to the federal government. NG units activated by the governor must be paid, housed, transported, defended in court, etc by the state.

The catch is that the routes, as of yet, purport to impose operational restrictions on the federalized units. The administration isn’t exactly strictly following them, but they still exist and district judges are attempting to enforce them. The administration is hard at work developing a “colorable” basis to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to remove nearly all such restrictions.

Indeed, like I tried to explain earlier. This is just the deployment phase, execution follows after they find some loophole to invoke the Insurrection Act. And then things will turn very ugly very fast for many -- which you can clearly see if you recognize the patterns.

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