Constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz said Monday that California Governor Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit aiming to block President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles is unlikely to succeed.
Newsom, along with Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, filed the lawsuit after Trump ordered the deployment in response to riots that broke out following a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid at a Home Depot. Speaking on The Dershow, Dershowitz expressed skepticism that the Supreme Court would be willing to “second-guess” the president’s authority to deploy the National Guard in such a situation.
“The Supreme Court will not second-guess the President of the United States on this issue,” Dershowitz said. “They will say, whether right or wrong, the president had the authority to make this decision and he had the authority to make it over the lack of consent of the governor,” Dershowitz continued.
“Let’s be clear, there was violence. You can see it on television; there were bombings, fire bombings, and burnings of Teslas and other self-driving cars. There were rocks being thrown at ICE officers. There were threats against ICE officers, threats against their families. Was it a full-blown insurrection? No,” Dershowitz continued.
As riots continued on Monday, President Trump ordered an additional 700 Marines to support the National Guard deployment in Los Angeles. A video posted to social media over the weekend showed a person wearing a motorcycle helmet hurling rocks at the windshields of vehicles carrying ICE agents. The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the suspect’s arrest.
Importantly, per CNN, Newsom’s lawsuit only seeks to bar Trump’s use of troops to enforce immigration laws, which would likely be a violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act barring use of the military for civilian or federal law enforcement. But Trump, who the Constitution names as the commander-in-chief of all military forces, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is also named in the suit, did not task the military with law enforcement — only with protecting federal property and federal agents.
Dershowitz argued that the Supreme Court would have little option but to rule against Governor Newsom, citing historical precedents in which the federal government deployed the National Guard to enforce civil rights protections.
“My prediction is: the lawsuits will fail. They’ll work in the federal district court,” Dershowitz said. “You’ll get, you know, the governor of California will find a federal district judge probably one he was involved in appointing and you’ll get some district court judge saying, maybe even issuing an injunction saying, the president of the United States can’t do this.”
“It’ll be appealed immediately, but when the case gets to the Supreme Court in the United States, they would have no choice or little choice, but to hold that the judiciary cannot interfere with the discretionary judgment of the executive head of the executive branch. the president, about the necessity for sending in troops,” Dershowitz added.