When six Democratic lawmakers released a video in November 2025 urging U.S. troops to refuse unlawful military orders, they framed it as a defense of the Constitution. The Trump administration called it sedition.
The video appeared against the backdrop of two controversial administration actions: the deployment of National Guard troops to U.S. cities, a policy being actively litigated in federal court, and U.S. military strikes on suspected drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
It is important to note that no court had issued a final ruling determining either policy to be illegal, nor had any court found that illegal orders were given to individual U.S. troops. Equally significant, even if the Supreme Court were to ultimately determine that the president lacked the authority to order these deployments, the duties carried out by individual soldiers would not necessarily constitute illegal orders. Both issues involve complex questions of constitutional law that ordinary soldiers are neither trained nor qualified to adjudicate.
The lawmakers named neither action in the video, nor did they identify any specific order they considered unlawful. That omission would prove legally significant. Under military law, there is a critical distinction between reminding soldiers of a constitutional principle and encouraging them to act on their own political judgments. The latter is not a constitutional safeguard. It is a prescription for insubordination, and in some circumstances a crime.
The senator at the center of the resulting legal battle is Mark Kelly, a Democratic U.S. Senator from Arizona, a retired Navy Captain, and a former NASA astronaut who commanded multiple Space Shuttle missions.
Hellbound and Down 