Senate Democrats sought to pick apart the Trump administration’s legal rationale for sending National Guard troops and active Marines into Los Angeles this week in what they called a wildly out-of-proportion response to sometimes violent protests against President Trump’s escalating immigration sweeps.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) berated Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during an Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the Pentagon’s budget plans, saying the actions were undermining the readiness of America’s military.

“You are deploying the American military to police the American people; you are sending the National Guard into California without the governor's request sending the Marines not after foreign threats, but after American protesters; and now President Trump is promising heavy force against peaceful protesters at his DC military parade,” Murray said.

“Those sorts of actions and that sort of rhetoric from a President of the United States should stop every one of us cold," she continued. "Threatening to use our own troops on our own citizens at such scale is unprecedented, it is unconstitutional, and it is downright un-American.”

Hegseth repeatedly told senators that every move taken by........

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