Rick wrote:
homeagain wrote:
Rick wrote: Could you list Trump’s illegal orders? That moron Slotkin and the other treasonous assholes didn’t bother to mention what those orders are. They should all be charged and removed from office.
DOES THE WORD SEDITION SOUND FAMILIAR? DOES CALLING FOR A DEATH SENTENCE SOUND LIKE A REASONABLE SOLUTION? R WE REVERTING TO MEDIEVAL TIMES? SOUNDS LIKE IT TO ME.....2026 MID YEAR CAN NOT ARRIVE FAST ENOUGH...JMO
I wish you had the ability to understand the harm done, when these people in high positions decide to undermine the presidency. I wish you understood the danger our military personnel are put in when these scumbags, like Kelly and Slotkin, insinuate that these service members are carrying out illegal orders. Eventually the street animals will act, either on their own or with “incentives” from people with power. Your hero’s better hope those two National Guardsmen survive. Looks like another one of the dirtbags Biden invited into the country is responsible. Those two families won’t be having a very good Thanksgiving.
www.nationalreview.com/2025/11/military-lawfare-is-a-red-line/
November 29, 2025 6:30 AM
Incorporating the Pentagon into the campaign against political enemies — even those who make a craven video — raises the abuse of executive power to a new level.
Mark Kelly and the Seditionist Six sounds like a bad lounge act. That, at any rate, is how I decided to treat it — which is to say, ignore it. After all, it’s Thanksgiving. As we enter the holiday season, it’s time for not just good cheer but introspection: how blessed we are to be alive at a time of such abundance. It shouldn’t be the occasion for the week’s third or tenth or whatever episode of Trump-era sound and fury.
But it is.
This one, you’ve no doubt heard, involves a half dozen Democratic lawmakers who starred in a craven but legally unimpeachable video reminding our troops that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders. I have to say “remind” because it has already been drilled into our troops — the best trained fighting force in the world, more thoroughly tutored in their legal and ethical duties than any fighting force in history — that the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) obliges them to disregard orders that are manifestly unlawful.
And that’s why I also say the video was a craven act, particularly on the part of Senator Kelly (of Arizona). Although it appears that Senator Elissa Slotkin (of Michigan) orchestrated the video, Kelly has become the central figure.
Slotkin is a former CIA analyst and Defense Department bureaucrat, not an officer. Of the six lawmakers, including military veterans, only Kelly, a Navy captain, retired from the military as a senior officer. He is thus subject to recall and remains bound by the UCMJ.
Now, let’s not get deep into every constitutional patch here. To my mind, members of Congress should not be subject to executive control. The specter of punitively applying the UCMJ to Kelly effectively does that. But that’s an issue for another day. For the moment, the point is that Kelly knows he should stay a million miles away from a stunt like this video.
That’s not because it was criminal; it wasn’t, the theatrical rage of the president and his apparatchiks notwithstanding. It’s because the video was a politicization of our armed forces at a time when we desperately need them to be kept out of the political fray.
T
And as Kelly knows, when Democrats poke another hole in another norm, the president’s MO is to drive a truck through it.
When it comes to military effectiveness, few things rival chain of command. Orders are thus presumptively legal. Because combat is innately enveloped in gray area, U.S. soldiers and sailors are expected to follow orders unless it is patently obvious that the orders are illegal — say, hypothetically, an order to kill a prisoner in custody, or a peacetime order to kill a noncombatant who has posed no threat.
Consequently, it is unhelpful, at best, to admonish the armed forces to resist unlawful orders. As Kelly knows, troops are supposed to presume that orders are lawful; so if you want to establish that an order is unlawful, you need to be specific and persuasive: What order are you contending is illegal and on what basis do you contend this is so plain that the order should be disobeyed? In this special context, anything else is potentially disruptive. It may tend to undermine discipline and cohesion.
Now, let’s be clear: Disruptive is not a synonym for illegal, much less criminal. We seem to have lost our grip on such formerly unremarkable distinctions. Thanks to years of politicized law enforcement, we’ve become inured to a two-tiered system in which the party in power uses court processes to punish its opposition.
True to his nature, when Democrats light a fire Trump raises it to a conflagration. Hence, the president has sicced the FBI on the six Democratic lawmakers. And he is doing so even as his Republican congressional allies inveigh that the FBI’s perusal of their phone records — in connection with a scheme to obstruct Congress’s constitutional duty to ratify 2020 electoral votes — was a separation-of-powers outrage, for which they expect the taxpayers to enrich them to the tune of millions of dollars.
Trump also has the Pentagon rattling its sabers about a possible court martial of Kelly. That’s even more egregious.
There is no basis for a criminal investigation, civilian or military. The core of First Amendment free speech is political dissent. Even willfully incorrect statements of the law would not be prosecutable if the speech at issue is political in nature.
The Democrats’ video is not just political speech; it is political speech by members of Congress, whom the executive branch has no business investigating in the absence of blatant crime unrelated to legislative functions. Far from willfully incorrect, moreover, the statements that our troops should not obey unlawful orders were legally sound. As we’ve seen, it can be complicated assessing how manifestly illegal an order must be before it can confidently be disregarded, but that’s a basis for debate, not prosecution.
What is truly bizarre is to find the president, who likes to remind us that he is the nation’s chief law enforcement official, grossly misstating the law while claiming that the “Seditionist Six” are dangerously misstating the law (when in fact they’ve accurately stated the law).
As one of the few current or former prosecutors in the United States to have actually charged and convicted people for seditious conspiracy, I’m here to tell you that the heart of any sedition offense is the use of force against the nation or its government. Section 2384 of federal criminal law defines the crime as conspiring to levy war against the United States or to forcibly (1) destroy the government, (2) prevent execution of the laws, or (3) seize government property. The military law definition (Section 894 of Title 10, U.S. Code) is even narrower: To be guilty, one must join in the creation of a “revolt, violence, or other disturbance against” government authority, “with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of” that authority.
Nothing on the Democrats’ video comes close to urging or promoting violence. Indeed, in comparison to Trump’s fiery Ellipse speech prior to the Capitol riot, which also did not cross the burdensome legal threshold of incitement, the lawmakers’ video is vanilla. If Kelly had been urging his fellow military members to disobey lawful orders, that would be insubordination, not sedition. But he wasn’t.
The Democrats’ disruptive remarks might be cause for concern — not alarm, but some concern — if they had really been directed at our armed forces. But they weren’t. This was an attempt at striking the right balance between anti-Trump red meat for the Democratic base and an effective national security message aimed at the country writ large. Kelly, Slotkin, et al. are trying to convey that (a) “we’re not all woke whackos, we’ve actually got combat veterans and intelligence operatives who’ve fought this nation’s enemies,” and (b) “we would be more responsible stewards of our national defense than the current commander-in-chief, who is reckless and, on occasion, lawless.”
The problem is that Democrats lack the courage of their supposed convictions. I suspect they are obliquely implying that it is unlawful for the president to order drone attacks, without congressional authorization or enemy provocation, that (as of this writing) have obliterated 21 ships on the high seas off South and Central America and are estimated to have killed 83 people. Are the six Democrats saying that a drone operator who is ordered to kill the noncombatants operating those ships should disobey such an order?
That would be specific and a debate worth having. It would also be controversial and politically risky.
Regular readers will not be surprised to hear that I believe the drone attacks are illegal (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). But after years of the Justice Department’s rationalizing of similarly edgy presidential lethal-force orders, in the absence of either congressional authorization or any military threat against the United States, I’m not sure my view would carry the day among scholars, in Congress, or in the courts (which would probably stay out of the dispute).
That being the case, I find it highly doubtful that a military officer could confidently disobey an order to carry out an attack. I
do fear that our troops are pawns in this political game: If Democrats retake the House and impeach Trump, they and their media allies will suddenly claim the drone strikes were patently illegal, creating potential legal jeopardy for officers who sincerely believed they were executing lawful orders.
Alas, the six Democrats want to hint that the orders should be disobeyed, but they won’t say so outright because this is about politics, not courage or honor. Their calculation is that the drone strikes — the killings of what the administration calls “narco-terrorists” — are popular, even if wrong. Beyond that, the Democrats just want to bray that Trump is lawless without explaining how; it would thus be better for all concerned if they’d zip it and keep the troops out of it until they’ve got something helpful, rather than demagogic, to contribute.
Last point.
As the president watches his poll numbers plummet, it either doesn’t dawn on him or he just doesn’t care that he is in office, in part, because the voting public was unnerved by Democratic lawfare. Clearly, Trump’s statist mismanagement of the economy is his biggest problem, as it was Biden’s. But lawfare, also a problem for Biden, is a bigger problem for Trump.
Biden and his Justice Department officials knew enough to pretend, indignantly, that they would never politicize law enforcement. While they drew the line at insulting the public’s intelligence, Trump and his minions revel in lawfare. That further normalizes the noxious practice, potentially entrenching it. Trump is also handing Democrats the articles of impeachment they will swiftly enact if, as seems increasingly likely, his erratic governance hands them back the House next year — and maybe even the Senate the way things are going.
On that score, a terrible omen: Incorporating the Pentagon into the lawfare campaign against political enemies raises the abuse of executive power to a new level. Trump’s 2020 “stop the steal” machinations, while impeachable, were half-baked and impossible to take seriously as a coup attempt because they didn’t involve the armed forces. For the president to begin pulling the military he commands into his ongoing, punitive use of government processes against his partisan opponents is a red line. Justice Department lawfare is bad, but the courts are equipped to handle it. Politicization of the military is a different, more threatening beast.
I THINK THIS EXPLAINS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED AND THE PROBABLE RESULTS,WRITTEN BY
A PROFICIENT PROSECUTOR WHO ACTUALLY HAS EXERCISED THAT DECISION.....I ALSO THINK THAT THE WORD ''COURAGE'' IS THE BASIS OF ALL OUR PROBLEMS.....NO ONE,AND I MEAN NO ONE HAS THE TRAIT THAT IS NEEDED TO TAKE THE HEAT,HAVE SHIT RAIN DOWN ON U AND STILL STAND BY YOUR CONVICTIONS.....NO MATTER WHAT. BEEN THERE DONE THAT...NOT PRETTY,NOT FUN, NOT FOR THE WEAK MINDED OR MEEK IN MANNER...I TAKES A TOLL,BUT IF U R A BRAVE AND JUST BOLD ENOUGH INDIVIDUAL
...IT CAN BE DONE....JMO
