Troops on the Streets. Democracy in Peril 

Early last October, I found myself standing in line to enter a federal courtroom in Portland, Oregon, 100 miles from my home in the college town of Eugene. The scene was an emergency hearing, convened by a judge appointed by Donald Trump, to consider the administration’s plan to “federalize” units of the Oregon National Guard and—against the protests of the state’s governor and the city’s mayor—turn them loose on Portland’s streets to block protests in front of the ICE facility in the Southwest waterfront neighborhood.  

Trump had proclaimed that the city of some 650,000 was “war-ravaged” and that the U.S. Armed Forces were needed to control “rioters.” 

The hearing was a blend of hyperpolitical legal argument and high drama. Both the judge and lawyers understood that this was the opening shot in a long battle over local control of our streets and freedom from military rule.  

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Soon after, Judge Karin J. Immergut issued an injunction against the administration, ordering them to keep federal troops off the streets. As is often the case, the Department of Homeland Security deliberately disobeyed that order, sending one unit of National Guard Military Police to the facility. The judge asked why, and the government—in essence—shrugged.  

I also found myself later that day, standing in front of that ICE facility, watching as my fellow Oregonians pranced up and down the street dressed in animal costumes. A few days later, the protesters held salsa dances and aerobics classes in the street, while the costumed critters were joined by bicyclists who, as part of an “Emergency Naked Bike Ride,” wore rain ponchos or nothing at all.  

These fellow Americans—outraged but peaceful and humorous—were the “threat.” They were the “war.” To paraphrase Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Donald Trump met the “enemy within,” and he is us.  

The Portland lawsuit—Oregon v. Trump—is ongoing.  

A few weeks after my visit to Portland, I was in the fishing village of Newport, Oregon, where Homeland Security had taken a way a rescue helicopter needed by fishers plying the most dangerous fishery in the U.S. Though DHS didn’t explain why it was removing the helicopter the people of Newport had fought for, it soon became clear that the plan was to convert the air station into an ICE detention center—one that would, according to official plans, generate 10,000 gallons of human waste a day. The plan has so far hit a major roadblock—it is opposed not only by local government but also by a formidable force called Newport Fishermen’s Wives, “a non-profit corporation of fishermen’s wives, mothers, daughters, and friends, supporting a strong sense of community helping to further the causes of industry, safety, seafood education, and family support.”  

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I have felt lucky this fall and winter to be present at these skirmishes in the battle for the soul of our country. Trump plans to convert cities and towns all across the country to prison sites for his planned mass deportation. He wants troops on the streets to oversee our public life and our elections. But in communities everywhere in America—red states and blue—ordinary people are standing up and saying no to mass arrests and secret detention camps. It is groups like the Fishermen’s Wives in Newport, or the Portland World Naked Bike Ride and Doctors For Democracy in Portland. Their battles are being fought nonviolently in federal trial courts, city councils and county commissions, state legislatures and planning agencies, and on the streets, where ordinary citizens are keeping alive the cherished American right to protest.  

To appropriate a sometimes misused phrase, these people are doing politics right.  

I have the privilege of following these battles day after day. As Legal Affairs Editor of The Washington Monthly, I am trying to monitor these local battles. Fortunately, they are being fought at a time when hearings, filings, and opinions are available online. So I spend much of my day hunched over a computer reading legal prose in small type. I have been in and around journalism, man and boy, for half a century; never have I seen stories as crucial, as easy to cover, and (alas) as under-reported as these.  

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And after speaking with Washington Monthly Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris, we have agreed that these will be my focus for much of the next 12 months. The cases will work their way through the courts. Appeals will be decided, and what is crucial is how trial judges stand up to shameful attacks by the MAGA movement, and how successfully ordinary people organize themselves and turn out for public forums and government hearings.  

I spent ten years covering the U.S. Supreme Court before joining the Monthly in a part-time gig as Legal Affairs Editor. That once-proud Court (as I wrote in a cover piece for the magazine in 2022) seems more and more like a fashion accessory to Emperor Trump’s New Clothes. That story is well covered, but allegiance to the law has not disappeared—brave immigration lawyers, state and federal judges, local officials, and members of Congress—still hold the Constitution and the rule of law in their hearts. And that is what counts—that is what I would like the Monthly to help nurture in the year ahead.  

People dressed in inflatable costumes talk with Portland police officers outside a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. Credit: Associated Press

“I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts,” the great Judge Learned Hand wrote in 1944. These are false hopes; believe me, they are. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.” 

In the past weeks, I have seen that spirit alive in the safety-minded wives of fishermen, in the rubber frog costumes and revealing ponchos of street protesters, and in the courage of federal judges who refuse to bend the knee. I am immensely grateful to the magazine—and to you, our readers—for the chance to see and admire that spirit as it lives across America today. 

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