A suit to challenge the moving of the Space Command from Colorado to Alabama appears to be in the offing.
Last week, President Trump announced that he was declaring the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, as the new headquarters for the Command. The announcement meant that the Command would be leaving its present location at the Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
“We’re moving forward with what we want to do in the place that we want to have this,” Trump said of selecting Redstone. “This will be there hopefully for hundreds of years. That’s where it’s gonna be.”
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, however, has announced that he wants to challenge Trump’s decision in court.
Noting that the President had criticized Colorado’s use of election mail-in ballots as a factor in his decision in favor of Huntsville, Weiser said: “It’s wholly inappropriate and legally suspect for the President to decide the location of Space Command HQ based on how Colorado exercises its power under the U.S. Constitution to run our elections and our mail voting system.”
Weiser, who earlier this year announced that he is running for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2026, has also remarked that the White House “should not play political games with our nation’s military readiness and military families.”
The likelihood of such an action bearing fruit, contends the Colorado Springs Gazette, appears remote. “But if Weiser frames his argument as the Department of Defense failing to follow required administrative procedures, he may have a plausible case under the Administrative Procedure Act.”
To put it another way, Trump’s remarks on Colorado’s voting methods may have violated federal law mandating that decisions in the awarding of a military base in any given state must be “made based on merit, not politics.”
According to the Colorado Sun, Weiser has been a part of more than 30 lawsuits against the Trump administration since January of this year in matters related to such issues as gun control, healthcare, data privacy, and federal funding cuts.
Attacking the President’s Space Command decision from another direction, Colorado Democrat Representative Jason Crow, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, has remarked: “Trump’s decision to move Space Command simply because Colorado didn’t vote for him is disturbing. His politicization of our military makes America less safe.”
Crow has vowed to do what he can in Congress to frustrate Trump’s decision.
“We’re going to look at mechanisms through the appropriations process, through the defense budget, to try to slow it down as much as we possibly can,” Crow said in published remarks, “because that’s the right thing to do for our troops.”
