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You are to be forgiven if you’ve tried – and failed – to figure out whether the president of the United States has the authority to send the National Guard into America’s cities. Every day seems to bring another court ruling that Donald Trump can, or can’t, or then again maybe can, order the Guard into cities like Chicago or Portland, Oregon. It’s like a legal version of the zany comedy routine by Abbott and Costello, “Who’s on first?”
Andrea Katz, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, is here to help untangle the battle between a president who wants to send troops into cities he claims are overrun by protesters and governors resisting the deployment in their state.
“The conflict,” she writes, “throws into relief a question as old as the Constitution itself: Where does federal power end and state authority begin?”
The 10th Amendment, Katz writes, is at the heart of the conflict. But the amendment’s text has generated “plenty of confusion” over at least 200 years, as “the Supreme Court has treated the 10th Amendment like the proverbial magician’s hat, sometimes pulling robust state powers from its depths, other times finding it empty.”
The battles between governors and Trump are likely to be decided by the Supreme Court. “What the court will do, if the cases reach it, is uncertain,” says Katz.
Sorry, there aren’t obvious answers to the question. But Abbott and Costello do have an answer to the baseball query: “Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third.” Maybe constitutional law is more like baseball than we thought.
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Naomi Schalit
Senior Editor, Politics + Democracy
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Demonstrators in Portland, Ore., protest on Oct. 4, 2025, against President Donald Trump’s plan to deploy the National Guard to the city.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Andrea Katz, Washington University in St. Louis
The conflicts over President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Illinois and Oregon hinge on a question as old as the Constitution itself: Where does federal power end and state authority begin?
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