Austin Sarat writes:

What is happening in Washington, D.C., should alarm every American. The Founders of this country imagined that the federal government would play a small and secondary role, backstopping state and local government and carrying out functions (such as negotiating with foreign powers) that they could not.

The sight of the National Guard and Drug Enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other federal law enforcement agents on the streets of the nation’s capital would have shocked and horrified the Founders. They would have instantly recognized it as the behavior of a tyrannical king, not the elected leader of a constitutional republic.

The Intercept quoted Joseph Nunn, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice, who correctly observed that the willingness of the Trump administration to assert its “authority—the ability to use the military anywhere, anytime, for any purpose—it’s absolutely unprecedented…. The last person to assert that sort of boundless authority to deploy the military domestically and use it for law enforcement in this country was King George.”

But as bad as the deployment of federal forces in the District of Columbia is, what Attorney General Pam Bondi did yesterday, Aug. 14, made things much worse. She issued an order appointing Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as the “emergency police commissioner,” with “all the powers and duties” invested in the city’s police chief, Pamela Smith.

That means that Smith must now report to Cole and get his approval before issuing any orders or new policies.

Alas, the order is clearly illegal. But that didn’t seem to matter to the AG. [Continue reading…]