Garrett M. Graff writes:

When Americans worried about their nation slipping into a dystopian authoritarian regime, no one ever expected those nightmares to involve the Federal Protective Service. That’s in part because before the post-apocalyptic images of federal officers dressed in military gear waving flaming cans of smoke and dressed in gas masks on the streets of the community that inspired “Portlandia,” few Americans knew the FPS existed at all. Even today, the obscure entity may still be unknown to people reading about federal officers roaming Portland, Ore., in unmarked rental vans, snatching protesters off the streets with seeming disregard for civil liberties.

Yet the protective service — which languished for years within the Department of Homeland Security, with depleted ranks and a dwindling budget — has suddenly become central to the Trump administration’s plan to assert federal power in America’s cities, against the wishes of local officials, in a ploy to demonstrate Trump’s “law and order” credentials and further his reelection.

Overall, DHS, run by Chad Wolf — a onetime Hill staffer turned lobbyist with no law degree, law enforcement or military background, who is in his eighth month as acting secretary — has become over the last two years a textbook example of what happens when legal structures built for good governance are hijacked. Day after day, the department has become one of the clearest demonstrations in President Trump’s Washington of the old Michael Kinsley maxim: “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the scandal is what’s legal.”

The bending of legal and governmental norms has now culminated in the transformation of what are supposed to be federal building guards into an intimidating catchall invading army. (Ironically, most of the federal officers now giving the FPS a bad name publicly aren’t even members of the tiny service — they’re agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol who have been granted sweeping temporary powers to help FPS patrol federal buildings and facilities.)

The legal fudging in this episode begins at the top. Most of the key decision-makers at DHS hold their jobs because the administration has thumbed its nose at the Senate’s constitutional advise-and-consent role and has left key vacancies open for so long that officials are no longer even allowed to call themselves acting leaders. Like Wolf, deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli is also a temporary appointment, as is the general counsel, Chad Mizelle. The statutes that allow officials to serve in acting roles were crafted over the years with the expectation that presidents would actually attempt to fill the jobs. But that’s not how Trump uses them — just one way in which his presidency has turned into a civics lesson for America in what’s possible if you ignore the spirit of the law and only focus on its letter. [Continue reading…]