If President Donald Trump follows through on threats to send the National Guard to Chicago, his decision will not only stress-test the deep American antipathy to military rule. It will also generate a cascade of legal challenges with few precedents.

Trump may float New Orleans as his next target, but a deployment of the guard to Chicago over the objections of a Democratic governor raises two broad categories of legal question: Is the deployment legal, and are actions taken during a deployment criminal or unconstitutional? The first question, already a subject of litigation over Trump’s Los Angeles troop deployment, is mired in legal complexities, but it boils down to whether the courts will blink when confronted with blatant lies about the deployment’s rationale. The second question is easy to overlook, but vital in practice, because it illuminates the immediate stakes of expansive Guard deployment in the homeland.

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