Use and Abuse of the Insurrection Act

Trump’s Proposed Reason for Use of the Act Contrasts Starkly With History

President Trump has allegedly—and erro­neous­ly, if true—concluded that, if he invokes the Insurrection Act, even the courts’ ver­dicts can be sus­pend­ed.  He also claimed that 50% of the pres­i­dents have used the act.  Actually, the num­ber is 15.

He is quot­ed as stat­ing: “Everybody [not sure that every­body is com­plete­ly accu­rate] agrees you’re allowed to use that and there are no more court cas­es, there is no more anything.”

However, numer­ous legal schol­ars con­clude that invok­ing the Insurrection Act impos­es strict lim­i­ta­tions on the President’s pow­er and applies almost exclu­sive­ly to the use of fed­er­al troops to aid in main­tain­ing law and order.  Nothing in the act sus­pends the pow­ers of the courts nor places oth­er lim­its embod­ied in the Constitution.

Of course, this whole issue of insur­rec­tion has been large­ly raised recent­ly by the President and mem­bers of his admin­is­tra­tion to char­ac­ter­ize peace­ful actions and demon­stra­tions across the coun­try, sim­ply to facil­i­tate acti­vat­ing the National Guard in sev­er­al states and send­ing them to Democrat-con­trolled cities and states.  Apparently, insur­rec­tions don’t occur under Republican administrations.

Oh, wait!  Was that not an insur­rec­tion that occurred on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC?  The one in which the President refused to take any action to cur­tail it for over three hours?  How soon we forget.

The Insurrection Act, first pro­mul­gat­ed in 1807, has been amend­ed twice, the last in the 1870s.

Presidents who have invoked the law include Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Arthur, Cleveland, Wilson, Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and George Bush.  It was also ille­gal­ly used by General Douglas MacArthur in 1932 (only the President has the pow­er to invoke the act) when he over­saw the demo­li­tion of an encamp­ment of vet­er­ans in Washington, DC, a group that had arrived to demand a gov­ern­ment pen­sion that had been promised to them fol­low­ing World War I and which was need­ed at the time to help them through the Great Depression.

Grant used the act more than any oth­er President, six times, each time against white suprema­cists who were sub­ju­gat­ing Blacks in the South.  Kennedy and Johnson each used the act three times, most­ly to sup­port deseg­re­ga­tion in the South.

The last time the act was invoked was in 1992, by Bush, to sup­press riots in Los Angeles after the beat­ing of Rodney King by white policemen.

So, it’s been 33 years since a sit­ting pres­i­dent used the Insurrection Act, and the cur­rent pres­i­dent is propos­ing to use it as a cud­gel against peace­ful pro­test­ers who ver­bal­ly defy his policies.

Not only does the threat of the impo­si­tion of the act hang over the heads of every­one express­ing oppo­si­tion to gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy, but the President seeks to stir the mil­i­tary into believ­ing that the American pub­lic is now an “ene­my with­in.” He sug­gest­ed, in a recent meet­ing of over 800 top mil­i­tary lead­ers from around the world (nev­er mind the cost of bring­ing them all togeth­er in one place), that our cities should become “train­ing grounds” for urban war­fare train­ing for the troops.

Since the President has no mil­i­tary train­ing (hav­ing assid­u­ous­ly avoid­ed it through five draft defer­rals), he obvi­ous­ly can­not under­stand that using National Guard or reg­u­lar troops for crowd and crime con­trol in cities will not pro­vide the com­bat skills need­ed in true urban warfare.

In threat­en­ing to send National Guard troops to Detroit to con­tain “uncon­trolled vio­lent crime,” he cit­ed 3,000 deaths in the city as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion.  In fact, Detroit logged 203 crim­i­nal homi­cides in 2024—a drop of 195 from the pre­vi­ous year.

So, he not only dreams up ridicu­lous sce­nar­ios as a pre­tense for the use of fed­er­al troops on American soil, but he com­pounds his duplic­i­ty by using total­ly false num­bers as “facts.”  One might sup­pose these are some of the “alter­na­tive facts” left over from his pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion, as not­ed by his then-press sec­re­tary, Kellyanne Conway.

This President has demon­strat­ed time and time again that he will push the laws of the coun­try as far as pos­si­ble, until reined in by the courts or Congress, and the threat to use the Insurrection Act is a fur­ther­ance of his actions.

The American peo­ple must con­tin­ue to rely on the courts and the Congress to con­tain the President, although nei­ther seems much will­ing to do so at present.  And that fail­ure may well result in a nation­wide insurrection.