Our Republican Legacy Opposes Invoking the Insurrection Act

The issue. President Trump continues to promote and perpetuate a false narrative focused upon certain Democratic-led cities and states being “war zones” to justify his threats to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act is a vaguely worded law that grants a president the power to deploy the U.S. military domestically and use it against American citizens under certain conditions, including to suppress a rebellion or domestic violence, repel invasions, or to enforce the law.  This law is the exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits using the military as civil law enforcement.

Presidents of both political parties have invoked the Insurrection Act in limited, unique situations. Presidents George Washington and John Adams invoked it to suppress organized rebellions against federal authority. Abraham Lincoln used it during the American Civil War and Ulysses S. Grant used it in 1870 to suppress the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson used this law to deploy troops to desegregate schools in the South after the Supreme Court’s landmark civil rights decision in Brown vs. Board of Education ruling racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.  President George H. W. Bush deployed federal troops to Los Angeles in 1992 at the request of the governor to control riots in the aftermath of the beating and death of Rodney King by LA police officers.

Today, there are no comparable situations to the past, limited use of the Insurrection Act. This far into his second term, there is no current, legitimate justification for President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to increase his authoritarian reach for power over states and cities ahead of the 2026 mid-term elections. None.

Some of the peaceful protests in some major U.S. cities like Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, have led to arrests after provocation and altercations with both local law enforcement and Federal troops the President had already  ordered there – as he has threatened do in cities like Chicago and Memphis. But the minor incidents to date are no reason to invoke an overly broad and dangerous tool for this President to abuse and thereby advance his extreme agenda while denying citizens their rights and liberties under our Constitution.

ORL Policy Position. Based on our core principle to support the Constitution and the Rule of Law, we reject President Trumps’s false narrative that certain American cities in states governed by Democrats are currently “war zones,” which is the predicate for him to manufacture an invalid excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and advance his extreme populist agenda promoting more and more government control centered around the President. This is not what our Founding Fathers intended when they designed our system of government under a constitution with three separate but co-equal branches of government. There is no current justification to invoke the Insurrection Act to promote his policy objectives and retribution agenda against his so-called political “enemies.”

Action required. Our Republican Legacy recommends two action steps to safeguard our rights and freedoms while ensuring the ability of the president to act in a crisis consistent with the oath of office and the laws of the United States.

1. President Trump must cease and desist from continually making false and misleading statements to the American public about nonexistent “war” conditions in our cities and states, especially his targets led by Democratic mayors and governors. Congress, the media, and citizens have a responsibility to call out those falsehoods and provide an objective view of what reality is on the ground in the cities and states the President has targeted for his retribution and revenge. His repetitive, false, and vituperative statements tear away at the fabric of our democracy, raise exponentially the level of danger, and stoke an increase in confrontations among otherwise innocent people.
   

2. Second, ORL calls on Congress to conduct rigorous oversight hearings to determine the propriety of any use of the Insurrection Act, if invoked, and assess the Administration’s compliance with the provisions of Federal law, with due regard and consideration of the principles of federalism, states’ rights, and the rights reserved by the people as enshrined in the United States Constitution.