The Liberty Daily 
(The Epoch Times)—The Trump administration late on Nov. 25 appealed a federal district judge’s ruling requiring the government to end its deployment of National Guard troops in the nation’s capital.
President Donald Trump had said the troops were needed to deal with crime and violence in the District of Columbia and support federal immigration law enforcement efforts there.
On Aug. 11, Trump signed a presidential memorandum, in which he said the local D.C. government “has lost control of public order and safety in the city.”
“It is a point of national disgrace that Washington, D.C., has a violent crime rate that is higher than some of the most dangerous places in the world,” the document stated.
The new one-page notice of appeal states that the federal government is appealing the Nov. 20 ruling of U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
It does not provide a rationale for the appeal.
Cobb heard oral arguments on Oct. 24 on the District of Columbia government’s federal lawsuit against the deployment.
Cobb held that Trump’s takeover of the D.C. National Guard runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution and unlawfully interferes with local officials’ authority to control law enforcement in the District of Columbia.
The judge said the president has authority to call up the National Guard only “through the exercise of a specific power outlined in state law,” and not for “whatever reason” he sees fit.
Cobb said in her order that the court rejects the federal government’s “fly-by assertion of constitutional power, finding that such a broad reading of the President’s Article II authority would erase Congress’s role in governing the district and its National Guard.”
Article II of the U.S. Constitution spells out the president’s powers.
The president “has no free-floating Article II power to deploy the [D.C. National Guard] for the deterrence of crime,” she said.
“Historical practice confirms this understanding of the president’s authority.”
In her Nov. 20 ruling, Cobb paused enforcement of the decision for 21 days to allow the federal government to appeal.
