This proposal is based on Rule 70(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which lets a federal court appoint “another person” to carry out its order if the executive branch refuses and the Attorney General orders the U.S. Marshalls to stand down. I expanded on earlier legal commentary by Mark Elias exploring whether, with a governor’s voluntary cooperation, that “person” could be a state police commander acting through their chain of command. After Trump v. Illinois, the President can’t federalize a state’s National Guard to block it (and the patently illegal standard applies to the military chain of command), which makes this a theoretically viable enforcement fallback if the federal courts have no cooperation from the executive branch in enforcing their orders.

The proposal is too risky to use until a shared bipartisan legal consensus has returned, since a governor invoking it could be cast by some states as an “invasion,” trigger escalation the President couldn’t easily unwind, and produce second‑ and third‑order consequences that outweigh any deterrent value.

Proposition Judicial Guard with 2026 Update and Contextual Warning