Donald Trump pulls a Grover Cleveland
By BERRY CRAIG
Gavin Newsom isn't the first Democratic governor to rebuke a president for going over his head to muster military force in his state.
"President Trump took extraordinary action on Saturday by calling up 2,000 National Guard troops to quell immigration protests in California, making rare use of federal powers and bypassing the authority of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom," wrote Shawn Hubler and Laurel Rosenhall in The New York Times.
Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld similarly reproached President Grover Cleveland, a fellow Democrat, for sending federal troops to Chicago to crush the Pullman strike in 1894.
Hubler and Rosenhall quoted Newsom: "That move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions...this is the wrong mission and will erode public trust."
They also quoted Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley, law school: "For the federal government to take over the California National Guard, without the request of the governor, to put down protests is truly chilling. It is using the military domestically to stop dissent.”
Like the Republican Trump, Cleveland was a pro-business conservative.
Like Newsom, Altgeld was a progressive.
In a telegram, Altgeld, a German-born Union Army veteran, told the president that ordering army regulars to Chicago was "entirely unnecessary, and, as it seems to me, unjustifiable."
He schooled Cleveland on the Constitution: "under our Constitution, Federal supremacy and local self-government must go hand in hand, and to ignore the latter is to do violence to the Constitution."
Altgeld asked the president to remove the federal troops. The governor feared the presence of federal troops would provoke violence. He was right; fighting broke out, and men were killed and wounded on both sides.
Trump has long been partial to the notion of using federal might against protestors: "Mr. Trump suggested deploying U.S. forces in the same manner during his first term to suppress outbreaks of violence during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis," The Times reporters wrote. "He opted against doing so at the time, but he has repeatedly raised the idea of using troops to secure border states."
They added, "In 2020, in the final days of Mr. Trump’s first presidential term, military helicopters were used to rout peaceful protesters demonstrating against police violence near the White House."
Anyway, Trump and the GOP claim to be big fans of "states' rights," but only when it suits them. When it comes to silencing dissent against their guy’s screw-the-constitution authoritarianism, Team Trump and its captain are all for overriding state authority—especially in Blue states like California—and arbitrarily flexing Uncle Sam’s muscles.