If the Trump administration invokes the Insurrection Act, it will not happen in a vacuum. It will be enabled, normalized, and quietly tolerated by members of Congress who choose party loyalty over constitutional duty. That enabling figure is Congressman Jay Obernolte. By refusing to draw a hard line against the use of domestic military force for political ends, Obernolte would effectively allow the Insurrection Act to be enforced in our own district. We already have ICE gestapo in Victorville and Hesperia. Now imagine the Marines from 29 Palms in Redlands and Loma Linda.
The Insurrection Act gives the president extraordinary power to deploy federal troops inside the United States, overriding governors and local officials. Trump’s repeated threats to invoke it are not about restoring order but about asserting dominance over political opponents and bypassing local resistance. When a president frames protests, court rulings, or uncooperative local leaders as “obstructions,” the act becomes a blunt instrument of executive control rather than an emergency safeguard.
This is where Obernolte’s acquiescence matters. Members of Congress are not passive observers; they are constitutional actors. By failing to speak out about against the President, Obernolte would be signaling that federal troops rolling into the 23rd is an acceptable consequence of partisan governance. That is not neutrality. That is consent.
California has long stood for civil liberties, local governance, and resistance to federal overreach. Allowing the Insurrection Act to be enforced here would shatter that tradition. Once the military is used to police civilians under vague executive authority, the line between democracy and authoritarianism blurs rapidly. What begins as “restoring order” ends as suppressing dissent.
If Obernolte allows Trump's power grab to proceed unchecked, history will not remember it as caution or pragmatism. It will remember it as complicity one more step on the march toward an authoritarian government.
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