A half-dozen Democratic veterans in Congress released a joint video urging U.S. service members to disobey unlawful orders, though they did not specify what those would be.
Sens. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Reps. Jason Crow (D-CO), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chris Deluzio (D-PA), and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) said the “threats to our Constitution” are coming “from right here at home.” They repeatedly urged military and intelligence personnel to “refuse illegal orders.”
None of the Democrats in the video specified what illegal orders they should be concerned about or what to do if they believe they are given one.
“We are standing by our troops, our service members who are often put in very difficult positions and Donald Trump has put them in very difficult positions and has alluded to putting them in even more difficult positions in the months and years ahead, so we are reminding folks about what the uniform code of military justice says, what the Constitution says, what the law of war says,” Crow said on Fox News on Wednesday afternoon.
He cited President Donald Trump’s musings during his first term about whether service members could shoot U.S. protesters in the leg, his more recent decisions to send the National Guard into several U.S. cities to crack down on illegal activities, and possibly sending U.S. troops to election polling stations.
“Donald Trump has made a series of very disturbing comments and suggestions that would violate U.S. law and put our military in a terrible position,” Crow, a former Army ranger, added. “I don’t want to wait until that happens to remind our troops of this obligation because then it will be too late.”
Republicans pushed back on the Democrats’ video.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn said on Fox, “It is inconceivable that you would have elected officials that are saying to uniformed members of the military who have taken an oath that they would defy the orders that they have been given to execute their mission.”
Similarly, War Secretary Pete Hegseth responded to the video on social media, saying, “Stage 4 [Trump Derangement Syndrome].”
Crow denied that they were referring to the ongoing military operations in the Caribbean in the video. The military currently has its largest buildup of U.S. forces in the Western Hemisphere in decades. Since early September, the military has carried out roughly 20 lethal airstrikes on vessels they claim were carrying drugs intended for the United States, killing more than 80 people.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found in July that the U.S. troops involved in the lethal targeting of alleged drug smuggling vessels would not be exposed to future prosecution.
“We got lawyers on lawyers, all the authorities necessary to do so, treating these terrorists like the al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere,” Hegseth said last week.
Service members are required to follow lawful orders in accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and they can face prosecution for following unlawful orders.
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The precedent of whether a service member can face charges for following an illegal order came out of the trial of Lt. William Calley, who participated in the March 1968 slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese individuals known as the My Lai massacre. Calley took the stand in his own case, stating that his superior, Capt. Ernest Medina, who was later court-martialed and ultimately acquitted, had directed him to kill everyone in the village.
Calley’s defense team got the defense idea from the Nuremberg trials of captured Nazis following World War II.
