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Can President Donald Trump call up the National Guard to enter a city even if the governor of that state says no?

This basic question is under litigation across several federal courts in three states and is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. It has even more urgency now that Trump plans to send Department of Homeland Security personnel to San Francisco tomorrow, a move Gov. Gavin Newsom said is a precursor to the president’s sending in the National Guard. Trump said the city has a high crime rate and needs federal protection. City officials say crime is down.

“This is right out of the dictator’s handbook. Donald Trump does this over and over again,” the governor said in a social media post. Newsom said before Trump can summon the National Guard, he needs to sow anxiety in the streets so he can then “solve for that” with federal troops.

Before news broke of federal agents arriving in San Francisco, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sat down with CalMatters today to talk about Trump’s use of the National Guard.

“It would be dangerous and wrongly decided to allow the president to do what he’s trying to do now, which is to act as if he’s above the law, act as if he’s a king, treat the National Guard as his royal guard,” he said. “He will deploy only to blue cities. He will use it to punish enemies. He will use it to target those people who didn’t support him.”

Already Trump has issued an executive order directing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to establish a new “standing National Guard quick reaction force” for “rapid nationwide deployment,” California Department of Justice lawyers wrote to Supreme Court justices in a legal filing.

Already, federal courts are dealing with questions of the legality of sending state National Guard troops to Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland — cities in which the state attorneys general sued the Trump administration.

California is central to the national issue

Bonta is a key player in that Blue State resistance. His team was the first to challenge Trump on taking over control of the state National Guard under a rarely used law that allows the president to do this in times of invasion, internal rebellion or when U.S. laws cannot be executed with “regular forces” — a contested term.

California is ground-zero for this novel dispute. This is where Trump mobilized 4,000 of the state’s National Guard troops in June in response to two days of occasionally violent protests against federal immigration raids in the Los Angeles region.

Prior to Trump’s federalization of those troops in June, at no time in U.S. history was the law invoked without the consent of the state governor. Use of the law is exceedingly rare: It was used just once before June by President Richard Nixon to mobilize troops during a postal worker strike in 1970.

Bonta joined Oregon in suing Trump to halt him from sending the National Guard from Oregon, California and Texas to Portland, the site of sporadic protests. And California has filed legal briefings siding with Illinois to district and appellate courts, as well as the Supreme Court.

Frustratingly for the public, there’s no final answer in the near term. Instead, lawyers from liberal states suing the Trump administration are stuck in a standoff with Department of Justice attorneys defending the White House’s decisions. Each side has notched a roughly even collection of procedural victories and defeats with no sign of resolution.

Even a decision from the nation’s highest court — issued from the so-called shadow docket — will likely be preliminary and prompt new iterations of legal challenges as the merits of this fundamental question inch upward through the courts.

Adding to the confusion, most of the legal decisions and appeals about the president’s powers to take over the National Guard deal with temporary orders or preliminary injunctions. Only one court has answered a portion of the major issues around Trump’s powers — whether the National Guard and military can conduct law enforcement activities, and if so, what are the limits of those abilities.

In Bonta’s view and what California has argued in the courts, decisions siding with Trump could mean that the National Guard, controlled by the U.S. military, could accompany IRS officials on routine audits. It could mean armed forces at polling places on election day.

A lower court judge sided with California, but the 9th Circuit Court agreed with the Trump administration to stay that injunction.

That question of the law enforcement powers isn’t before the Supreme Court, but it may get there soon.

Federal government says courts can’t second-guess Trump

Attorneys for the federal government have been consistent in maintaining that judges cannot even review the president’s decisions to federalize a state’s National Guard troops. However, California state attorneys wrote to the Supreme Court that “every court to consider the question has rejected that argument.”

So far district court judges in California, Oregon and Illinois have agreed with Bonta and his Democrat counterparts. But twice already a panel of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that oversees the western states disagreed. They said the level of protest in the streets rises to rebellion and an inability for the federal government to conduct its operations.

Two sets of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals homed in on the level of violence in Portland and Los Angeles outside of federal immigration facilities. They suggested the unrest was significant enough to impede federal operations, blocking lower court decisions that sided with California and Oregon lawyers. At one point the Portland facility was closed for over three weeks, one of the judge panels noted.

Some of the judges overseeing the cases have questioned whether the administration’s evidence is reliable. “In addition to demonstrating a potential lack of candor by these affiants, it also calls into question their ability to accurately assess the facts,” Judge April M. Perry wrote. She’s a Biden appointee.

She also noted a “a troubling trend of Defendants’ declarants equating protests with riots.”

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals largely sided with Perry in her temporary restraining order blocking Trump from sending National Guard troops to the Chicago area. The White House appealed, and now that’s before the Supreme Court.

Lawyers for the federal government wrote to the Supreme Court that Perry’s order blocking Trump from deploying the National Guard to the Chicago area “downplays or denies the ongoing threat to the lives and safety of federal agents, substitutes the court’s own judgment for the president’s about the need for military augmentation, and gives little or no weight to the United States’ interest in enforcing federal immigration law.”

Meanwhile, Bonta is troubled by the administration’s arguments that unrest in June can justify new and continued deployment of the National Guard months later. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said. His legal team has written that there needs to be a limit for how long the National Guard can be deployed if the violence that prompted their federalization has subsided.

Bonta is ready if Trump sends troops to Bay Area

Still, Bonta permits that of the three cities at the focus of the federal lawsuits over Trump’s ability to send the National Guard — Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland — “I’d say the federal government had their strongest case in L.A.”

But is what occurred in Los Angeles a form of rebellion? Not according to Bonta.

“Rebellion is a violent effort to overthrow the government,” he said. The violence against federal buildings and immigration law enforcement facilities in the cities Trump targeted “isn’t good,” but it’s not a government overthrow.”

“The trivializing of these very important words with high standards by the federal government, it is being done on purpose,” he said. The Trump administration “calls seemingly everything an emergency or rebellion or invasion,” including illegal immigration. “But that’s not what it is.”

While Bonta said he considered trying to preempt the president’s use of armed forces in San Francisco, the technicalities of the federal court system don’t let his team sue until the troops arrive. Yesterday he and Newsom said they’re ready to sue if Trump does that.

“It’s difficult to do something preemptively,” Bonta told CalMatters.