The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the president to use active-duty military personnel to perform law-enforcement duties inside the U.S. Unfortunately, the Insurrection Act was written in fairly broad terms, with little specific guidance on how and when the powers can be used. It apparently gives presidents wide latitude in deciding when to mobilise military personnel for domestic operations. Presidents can invoke the law if they determine that “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” against the government make it “impracticable to enforce” U.S. law “by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings”. To date, President Trump has chosen not to invoke this Act. One important reason is that if he chooses to invoke the Act, it remains unclear what further legal challenges he might face. Since the start of his second term, he has sent or talked about sending troops to 10 American cities.
Already, the Trump administration is facing numerous challenges to his use of federalizing the National Guard in cases involving Los Angeles and Chicago. Most recently, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deploying any National Guard units to Portland, Oregon, including the California National Guard. U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, issued the order pending further arguments in a lawsuit brought by the state and city. She said the relatively small protests the city has seen did not justify the use of federalized forces and allowing the deployment could harm Oregon’s state sovereignty. California and Oregon also sought the temporary restraining order after U.S. President Donald Trump sent guard members from California to Oregon. The same judge temporarily blocked his administration from deploying Oregon National Guard troops to Portland. This upset Trump who then talked about invoking the Insurrection Act.
The use of the Insurrection Act has normally been under very exceptional circumstances since its first use by Abraham Lincoln when the southern states rebelled during the US Civil War, and by former President Ulysses S Grant against a wave of racist violence by the Ku Klux Klan after the war. It was last used by President George Bush in 1992 when massive riots broke out in Los Angeles over the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a black man. The American government has traditionally worked to limit the use of military force on American soil, especially against its own citizens. Its use would be an extreme option in order to allow the Trump administration to circumvent legal hurdles. It was reported that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller in creditably declared that the government was facing a “legal insurrection”, and that court rulings against its law enforcement efforts were tantamount to “an insurrection against the laws and Constitution of the United States”.
Suggesting that the use of the military to assist local police forces, as was the case in Washington, D.C., in fighting urban criminal activities would appear to be an extreme measure and one which does not inspire confidence in local and state police forces. There has to date been no real evidence of any form of organized insurrection in American cities. Suggesting that the police cannot deal with civil protests against such policies as the Trump administration’s approach to the potential arrests of illegal undocumented persons has been greatly exaggerated. In effect, the appearance of military personnel on the streets only makes the potential angry reaction of peaceful protesting groups even more likely, especially when they are exposed to the use of tear gas and other riot control measures.
Invoking the Insurrection Act under the current circumstances would be a serious political and policy mistake on the part of the President. It would certainly strengthen the perception that this administration has become increasingly authoritarian in its use of presidential powers, very often attempting to circumvent the judicial system. I strongly believe that given its very definition, there is no existing insurrection in the U.S., armed or otherwise. The very use of this term has been severely abused by the Trump administration, and can only lead to much more unrest by the citizenry in the affected cities of this great nation.
FROLITICKS 
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