I think the crisis actually isn't a civil military crisis. It's a civil civil crisis where Congress is failing to use the Article I authorities that the Constitution expects to balance aggressive presidential policy actions like the ones President Trump is taking.

It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Lauren Voss, Public Service Fellow at Lawfare, with Corey Shockey,

senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise

Institute. And Carrie Lee, senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund's

Strategic Democracy Initiatives. You know, as you're making increasingly controversial orders,

I would not be surprised, right? If you had senior civilian leaders really trying to

pick and choose who in that chain of command is going to be responsible for executing those types of orders and what units they're selecting and what their own cultures are and histories are.

Today we're talking about Civ Mill Relations. Where are we now and how did we get here?

This is the first episode in a series on domestic military power and a democracy.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. military has become the government's most trusted

and frequently deployed institution, responding not only to wars abroad but to natural

disasters, immigration enforcement, public health crises, domestic unrest, and more. Lawfare is examining

the consequences of this shift. Why has the military become America's default problem solver?

What legal frameworks enable this trend, and why are they failing? And most importantly,

what can be done to restore the balance between civilian governance and military power?

The news in the last six months has focused on domestic deployments of the military, primarily

the National Guard, in cities like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Portland, Chicago, Memphis,

and Louisiana. More recently, the United States stated it was at war with a number of drug

cartels. Which ones isn't exactly clear,

but it's resulted in 26 military strikes, so far, on alleged drug smuggling vessels in international

waters. Both types of missions have raised significant questions about the appropriate role of the

military in the United States and how we think about civ-mill relations. So, Corey, I'm going to turn to you first

...