Six current members of Congress— all with military or intelligence backgrounds—recently issued a video in which they urged current members of the military to obey the law (Riley Ceder, “Lawmakers urge troops to refuse illegal orders in video,” November 20, 2025).
The six Democratic lawmakers included Elissa Slotkin (Senator from Michigan and a former CIA analyst)); Jason Crow (Representative from Colorado and a former Army combat veteran ); Mark Kelly (Senator from Arizona and a former Navy captain and astronaut), and three lesser-known legislators.
Nothing controversial about their message, you say?
Yet that video has sparked lots of controversy.
Because these lawmakers were pointing out that people in the military not only MAY disobey an illegal order but that they MUST disobey such a directive.
All troops are taught this principle, very early in their military careers. My husband, who never saw active duty but spent several years in the Army Reserves and in National Guard, says one of the first things he learned in basic training was “DO NOT OBEY AN UNLAWFUL ORDER.”
This may come as a surprise to anyone who thinks that enlisted personnel are expected to obey automatically any direction from a superior officer. Maybe we tend to think of soldiers as automatons, acting without thinking to follow any directive they’re given.
Not so. When someone enlists in the military, he or she does not check his/her humanity or good judgment at the door. The enlistee is expected to evaluate each order and determine if it’s valid or if it somehow violates the law.
A big responsibility to put on someone who may be barely into adulthood before joining up, you say?
You betcha. We do ask a lot of people in the military. But military service is definitely an adult responsibility, one that could possibly involve even the loss of one’s own life.
President Donald Trump came out shortly after the video appeared with an angry statement that the Democratic lawmakers had committed “seditious behavior,” which he said was “punishable by death.”
My copy of Webster’s New World dictionary, Fourth Edition, defines “seditious behavior” as the “stirring up of rebellion against a lawfully constituted government.”
Sorry, Trump, you’ve got it wrong. What these legislators did in making that video was the OPPOSITE of seditious behavior, since they were simply pointing out what the ACTUAL law IS.
The fact that you may not know, or care, what military personnel are required by law to do doesn’t change anything.
Whatever Trump says about proper behavior for someone in the military is suspect anyway. He avoided military service himself entirely, with four student deferments and then a deferment for “bone spurs.”
That unlikely affliction, diagnosed by a Queens podiatrist who rented property from Fred Trump, Donald’s father, mysteriously healed a few months after Donald graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. That was in 1968, one of the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War ((businessinsider.com/ Donald-Trump-avoided-the-military- draft-which-was-common-atthe- time-vietnam-war-2018-12).
Trump wasn’t the only young man, as Business Insider points out, who used wealth and family connections to avoid military service at that time.
But the President is far from being believable as an “expert” on anything military.