Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Joyce Vance: Thank you for being patient with me. My schedule has been messy for the last couple of months while I took on a big project, but I’ve been dying to get on with you. And I’m glad it’s today.
Vance: Yeah. I think it’s important to have a sketch of the law in the District of Columbia. It’s very different from if Trump was trying to do this in a state—because D.C., not a state, is governed by home rule statutes that give Donald Trump more power in the district than he has elsewhere. And that happens in two ways. First, the National Guard. The president is always in charge of the D.C. National Guard. The guard is not one nationwide entity. Every state has its own. In D.C., the commander is Donald Trump. He can deploy them at will. And a very important difference is that in the states, he cannot use a fighting force for domestic law enforcement because of something called the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits it. In D.C., the Justice Department has for decades taken the position that Trump can use the guard for domestic law enforcement. So that’s number one.
Donald Trump invoked claiming that there was a crime problem in the District of Columbia. And Justice Department statistics included.… At least the last time I looked at DOJ’s website—I wouldn’t be surprised if they purged this—those statistics say that crime in the District of Columbia is down. And that undercuts everything Trump is doing.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): We’re going to fight crime. That’s a good thing. Already they’re saying, He’s a dictator. The place is going to hell, and we’ve got to stop it. So instead of saying he’s a dictator, they should say we’re going to join him and make Washington safe. But they say he’s a dictator.
Vance: Yeah, I think it is very alarming. The president of the United States should owe a duty of candor to citizens in this country. And the idea that he can just make it up as he goes along at the expense of the Constitution and the separation of powers and, perhaps most importantly here, the notion that we have a federal government—a system of federalism—where powers that aren’t explicitly granted to the federal government are reserved to the states.… And the fact [is] that the Republican Party, which has stood for that principle for so many decades, defended it so fiercely against what they claimed was Democratic overreach, now just [appears] to be sitting around saying, Whatever, do whatever you want to do, Donald Trump. This is, I think, important to note. This is not the Republican Party that people grew up with.
Vance: Right. And we heard this in the opening comments. I heard just a little bit of the hearing that started at 2 p.m. EST today so I don’t know what happened after the first five minutes, but early on, the government floats the argument, Well, Judge, you can’t look behind his decision-making process. This isn’t the first case we’ve heard that in. We’ve heard that in deportation cases. We’ve heard it in impoundment cases. This notion of an all-powerful executive who is able to make discretionary decisions and no one can review them. And look, I want to push back hard on that. I think in many ways what they’re trying to do here is shift the Overton window and set the public up to believe in a more powerful presidency than the one that’s actually established by the founding fathers.
Sargent: And the Republican Party is all in with Trump on this, not just the sending of troops into cities but also all in on the use of pretexts for it. Listen to what GOP representative James Comer had to say about this.
Sargent: What’s funny there is he gives away Trump’s whole scam by accident. He says suddenly out of the blue, crime has vanished. But in fact, he’s just describing the actual state of things in D.C., which as you mentioned is that crime is significantly down. I’ve got to say though, it’s unnerving as hell that the Republican Party is now all in for both the hypermilitarization and this use of nonstop propaganda to justify it. Where’s this all going?
For instance, they’ve set up four nighttime curfew zones in D.C. this summer to tamp down on some of the gang problems that they were having. And that works really, really well. If they were committed to crime reduction, they would be funding those initiatives. And if the administration was sincere about its goal of crime reduction, we would see them claiming victory. But we’re not seeing that. We see them continuing to use the pretext of needing to engage in mass deportations of serious criminals to flood the streets with this police presence that’s intimidating, that’s masked. We saw that on Thursday at the press conference California Governor Gavin Newsom had where just not for nothing masked ICE agents show up. It’s hard to view this as anything other than a test balloon to see just how far this administration can go in violating democratic norms.
Vance: I think the problem is whether Americans will wake up in time, right? There’s a breaking point, a tipping point past which Trump has normalized the use of law enforcement, maybe of military troops on American soil. It’ll require sign-off from the Supreme Court. It’s unclear what will happen when these issues reach them. These would seem to be clearly established legal principles that would prevent what Trump wants to do, but the court has gone there in the past. And so I don’t think that we have confidence about how the Supreme Court will rule on these issues. And it may be that Americans wake up only when it’s too late.
Vance: Yeah. Look, democracy is a participatory sport. It’s something that we all have to be engaged in. I think the real problem here is that those of us who are paying attention understand the tension here and have begun to figure out for ourselves how we balance it. But the reality is that so many Americans either have continued to believe Trump’s lies or are people who, for whatever reason, have decided to tune out—maybe because they think it’s too much for them to handle or they think it doesn’t impact them personally. And that’s the real problem in this country: political apathy and the failure to understand that democracy isn’t just something we’re given. Democracy is something we have to continue to fight for in every generation. And look, our fight looks real different than past generations. We’re not fighting a war on a battlefield. We’re fighting a war on American soil in voting booths for Americans to wake up and see what Donald Trump is doing before it’s too late.
Vance: I do know what you mean, and I think it’s a real concern, right? This notion.… Well, I’ll tell you. I had a conversation this morning with a friend, and we were talking about whether or not people should protest. And she articulated a concern that if there was, say, a general strike that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and use that to put everything down and to, perhaps, take control in advance of the next election cycle. And I think that fear can become paralysis and keep us from acting. And yet, it’s also a realistic fear. Right? That could absolutely happen. And so I think the reality is the country needs to reach more of a uniform consensus. Unfortunately, that may require letting things get worse so that enough people wake up.
Sargent: And I guess we should underscore that Trump and Stephen Miller and some of the more overtly fascist and authoritarian advisers around Trump really do want people to tune out. They really are trying to acclimate American voters to this military presence, this authoritarian display. And that’s something we can’t let happen, is it?
Sargent: Joyce Vance, harrowing stuff. Folks, if you enjoyed this discussion, please make sure to check out Joyce’s forthcoming book, Giving Up is Unforgivable, a manual for keeping a democracy. Joyce, it was really, really great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Vance: Thanks for having me.
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