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Congressional Republicans are signaling they’ll give President Donald Trump wide leeway in his deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, potentially setting up a long federal presence in California amid fiery protests of the president’s deportation policies.
GOP leaders to the rank-and-file down to the libertarian-leaning Rand Paul offered no criticism Monday of Trump’s tactics over the weekend. And some said they wouldn’t put a timeline on the National Guard’s presence in the state given the uncertainty of future demonstrations.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Semafor that “I don’t think they need to stay any longer than it takes to restore order.” Some of his colleagues said that could be a while, wary that protesters might try to wait out federal forces.
“It’s like any military-style engagement where – when you have active combat ongoing, which is essentially what we have now – you can’t put an arbitrary timeline on that,” Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., told Semafor. “That’s really giving the adversaries what they want.”
The relatively unified message from Republicans is a contrast to the party’s divisions during the nationwide racial justice protests in 2020. Back then, GOP leaders pursued a national police reform bill in response; five years later, Republicans see immigration enforcement as a clear success of Trump’s first term.
And they’re not deviating in strategy, even as Trump takes a harder line quelling protests and expelling immigrants in the United States illegally.
There’s a major partisan dynamic playing out nationally: It’s the president vs. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, a top Trump foil and possible White House candidate in 2028. That helps make it easy for Republicans to back Trump’s military moves in the blue state.
“Whether or not it’s my first choice? My first choice would be that there isn’t any of this violence and that local police would take care of it. Local police are always better than when we use federal police,” Paul told reporters.
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Trump is escalating the federal presence in California, temporarily deploying hundreds of Marines to Los Angeles as well. In theory, the president could then invoke the Insurrection Act to order the Marines to join local law enforcement in stifling demonstrations.
“I hope it doesn’t come to that, but at some point, if it does, it does,” Sheehy said. “There appear to be foreign people waving foreign flags, attacking local, state, federal law enforcement, physically throwing rocks at them trying to destroy the vehicles trying to kill them and hurt them. So if that’s not an insurrection, I don’t know what is.”
The most senior Republican senator, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, said he supported Trump’s handling of the situation thus far, calling it “proper” to order the National Guard to protect federal property, citing vandalization and damage to the Oregon courthouse during protests in 2020.
“Safety of the American people is the responsibility of governors and presidents,” Grassley said. “The bottom line is, if a Democrat state and a Democrat mayor can’t have a peaceful demonstration, then it’s our responsibility to step in.”
Some Republicans declined to address Newsom’s Monday dare for Trump border czar Tom Homan to arrest him after Homan vowed to spare no elected official if he sees laws violated. Not all, though.
“Newsom has calculated that this is beneficial to him, standing up for Trump, inviting him and goading him into arresting him … he might give him what he asks for,” Cornyn said.
Democrats decried Trump’s actions and said he seemed to only be provoking greater confirmation between protesters and law enforcement. Most importantly, though, they said Trump is trying to distract from the unpopularity of his tax bill and its health care cuts.
“He wants to divert the attention from his big, beautiful bill. It’s not getting very good reviews,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill. “So he’s drawing attention to Los Angeles.”
Notable
- California is filing suit against the president over the troop deployment, per the Washington Post.