…because it was unethical and legally indefensible. Of course, the libertarians loved it because they are almost as Trump Deranged as the Axis. Libertarians don’t like strong Presidents who don’t hesitate to use their Constitutional and statutory powers. Fortunately, most Americans do and always have. Libertarians’ list of favorite Presidents begin with Calvin Coolidge. What color is the sky on your planet, Illya Somin?
A federal appeals court on June 19 extended its block of a Judge Breyer’s flamingly partisan order that directed President Trump to return control of California’s National Guard to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was obviously determined to let pro-open border crazies harass ICE agents and riot across Los Angeles.
The three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals in the 9th Circuit issued a unanimous order, and one of the three judges was a Biden appointee! The roughly 4,000 National Guard troops can now stay in Los Angeles, to protect federal property and U.S. immigration agents, while preventing a replay of George Floyd Madness that the Mad Left would dearly love to see. Could a “Undovument Migrants’ Lives Matter” group be far behind?
Trump invoked Title 10 to call the Guard into federal service earlier this month in response to activist efforts to interfere with legal immigration enforcement raids while adding violence, vandalism and looting to the agenda. Newsom, a Democrat seeking Brownie points to get him the Presidential nomination in 2028, objected to the use of the Guard in California’s largest city and sued the President over his decision to federalize the California Guard, even though the law and precedent indicated that Trump was well within his Presidential powers. The Trump administration appealed Breyer’s nonsense, first winning a temporary stay of Breyer’s order and then the most recent ruling that “it is likely that the President lawfully exercised his statutory authority” to federalize the National Guard” because Title 10 allows such action whenever “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion,” or when the president is unable to “execute the laws” of the U.S.
So there.
As Professor Turley points out, Breyer’s order was so clearly politically biased that he should hide his head under a bag, as the late Justice Scalia once said of Breyer’s brother when they both were on the Supreme Court. “District Court Judge Charles Breyer …suggested in open court that Trump was acting like another “King George,” Turley writes. “He then wrote an opinion that included many Democratic talking points — suggesting, for example, that Trump was creating disorder by calling out the National Guard to deal with disorder. Breyer further indicated that the violence in Los Angeles was relatively minor, despite potentially deadly attacks on law enforcement, arson, and looting.”
The President, in short, was right.
Again.
Just once, I’d like to hear one of the Trump Deranged admit that bias has made one of their number stupid, as it did with Breyer in this case. I’d also like to fly to Neptune by flapping my arms…
Ethics Alarms 
Judicial activism from judges like Breyer and Boasberg undercut the legitimacy of the courts, and make it ethical for the Trump administration to simply ignore the courts; I am surprised that Trump has not already done so.
I do not know why you mention Calvin Coolidge as a diss to the libertarians. Calvin Coolidge was a Republican, and may be one of the underrated Presidents. Calvin Coolidge as Governor of Massachusetts called in the State Guards to squelch the Boston Police Strike in 1919, making the statement “There is no right to strike against the public safety, anywhere, anytime”. Calvin Coolidge was cut from totally different timber than current governors as Gavin Newsom, who endanger public safety by nullifying federal immigration law and condoning riots to prevent law enforcement by ICE.
I mention Coolidge because his passive leadership was substantially responsible for the 1929 stock market crash (which was pinned on his successor, Herbert Hoover); his foreign policy helped fuel the rise of Hitler, and the end result of his government-shrinking leadership was the New Deal, which was the largest expansion of government power and bureaucracy imaginable at that point in our history. He’s the perfect example of how libertarianism ignores inconvenient truths.
I won’t dwell on the fact that you cite Coolidge’s record as Governor to defend his Presidential record, but ya know..…yes, he had some great moments as a governor…
Interesting. I think I’d like to read more on this interpretation of the history. Can you recommend a book?
The problem with Coolidge is that, much as with Reagan, the ideological bias of historians makes finding an objective analysis difficult. This one is, I think, close to fair: https://www.amazon.com/Calvin-Coolidge-David-Greenberg/dp/0805069577
This one is fascinating: https://www.amazon.com/Tormented-President-Coolidge-Depression-Contributions/dp/027597931
OOPS! That last link doesn’t work—missing a number. Here’s the right one:
Well, dang, how did I not know that Coolidge was mayor of Northampton? It was a bit before my time there, but still….
Speaking of Coolidge and the Great Depression, though, by not running for a second term he did manage to pass much of the public opprobrium for it to Hoover. He only served 1 1/2 years of Harding’s term so there was no real or traditional bar to him running again.
If he had, do you think his actions would have been substantially different than Hoover’s regarding the economic crisis?
1. No.
2. I have always wondered if Cal saw the clouds on the financial horizon and decided to get out before his chickens came to roost.
My impression is that Calvin Coolidge is undervalued as a President because he is unfairly maligned for the Great Depression by liberal historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, who ranks Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a great President right after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington; Woodrow Wilson is also considered a great President by Arthur Schlesinger. Herbert Hoover and Warren Harding are considered failures; in some of those rankings Warren Harding is the worst President together with James Buchanan. Calvin Coolidge is considered as below average, together with Fillmore.
An example of such a ranking (from 1996) is below:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice2004/leadership/schlesinger.html
The problem with those ranking is that they say as much about the rankers than the about the Presidents. Historians such as Schlesinger blame the Great Depression on the 1929 stock market crash, believe that the New Deal saved the USA from the Great Depression, and have a preference for highly activist Presidents with an idealist foreign policy who build out the administrative state and create a big government, which is why Woodrow Wilson is highly valued.
Amity Schlaes in her book “The Forgotten Man” presents a completely different story on the Great Depression, as this was as much caused and exacerbated by the Smoot Hawley tariff which became law under Herbert Hoover, and tight money policy which led to bank failures and deflation. According to Schlaes the New Deal policies prolonged the Depression as it created great insecurity among business and investors who sat on their capital, scared about what FDR might do next. The war economy of World War II actually ended the Great Depression. Stock market crashes do not have to lead to a depression; as the stock market crashes during the Reagan administration (1986, junk bonds) and Harding (1920-1921) proved, as the stock markets roared right back without intervention by a President.
We need to be careful with blaming USA foreign policy in the 1920’s (isolationism) with the rise of Adolf Hitler. My impression is that Woodrow Wilson carries a much greater responsibility here, as well as Great Britain and France. Isolationism was alive and well during the FDR administration ( with FDR as an exception as witnessed by his lend/lease program) up until Pearl Harbor; it still has some adherents today such as Tucker Carlson.
And I believe that we should give moral luck its due as well when valuing a President; Coolidge had no way of knowing about the rise of Hitler, and about the Great Depression.
Jack, are we going to get a ranking from you about the 10 greatest USA Presidents? I am curious about 3-10, as I think we all agree on Lincoln and Washington as the greatest.
Schlesinger’s ratings were begun in the Sixties and he hardly changed them as he got older. Everyone knew he was a pimp for the Kennedeys: in his ratings he usually had JFK as “near great,” which is ridiculous. Nobody rates Wilson highly any more. Just because Jr. was wrong on most of his ratings doesn’t prove he was wrong on all of them, and Coolidge is not a tough call. The President who gets caught with a long-brewing disaster is the one usually blamed, hence Hoover’s dilemma, but in most cases [Clinton-9/11]; [JFK/Vietnam] the predecessor shares responsibility. Lot’s was changing and evolving between the wars—it was no time for minimal governing. Coolidge also let the labor movement erupt into violence because the government was protecting big business, Jim Crow was taking root, and there were assaults on the First Amendment, as in the Scopes case. Coolidge should have provided leadership where it was needed. He sat those issues out.
Moral luck plays a big part in assessing all Presidencies, but the job has to be assessed by whether a President handled what he was given. I think the top 9 POTUSes are a pretty easy call: in order of the sequence, Washington, Monroe, Lincoln, Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Teddy, FDR, Eisenhower, and Reagan. There’s no way FDR can be left out, and I think his argument for being #3 is solid. He probably sopped the Us from breaking down into a revolution with his leadership during the Depression, and he also probably saved the world from Hitler, being only second to Churchill in that regard. Yeah, he did a lot of bad things too, but his high points were existential.
Coolidge also significantly cut government expenditures and services, including literally cutting the red tape that binded documents. Regular string was cheaper. Reducing the size of government is a libertarian goal.
I never knew that. But I might have known that ‘red tape’ at one point had a literal meaning.
Looking into Coolidge, I found this fascinating tidbit in the Time Magazine archive from 1925. Apparently there was a daily line of handshakers where hundreds of people came to the White House every day to shake the president’s hand. Think about that for a minute.
And apparently Coolidge devised a method for making this process more efficient (from his point of view):