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GELFAND’S WORLD - Are we moving towards some moment of reckoning? Real life – or at least government and international relations – have become something like one of those over-the-top Seinfeld episodes where everyone is overacting. Except in our current episode of real life, murder is being implemented as policy by a federal police force. So where is this all going? Let’s start with the popular obsession that the president is looking for an excuse to implement the Insurrection Act and thereby turn our country into an autocratic tyranny.
We might at least try to think the idea through, and that includes, among other things, looking up what the Insurrection Act and its sister legislation, the Posse Comitatus Act, actually say. For this, we can take a look at the Wikipedia entries for the one and for the other.
As many pundits have mentioned, the latter act limits the power of the government to use the armed forces to enforce civil and criminal law. The historical context for this act – getting federal forces out of the post-Civil-War south so as to allow the resumption of segregation and Jim Crow laws – is of note. The former (but actually older) act allows for exceptions: The president can send in armed forces in the event that circumstances make this necessary. It has been used to end riots and to enforce desegregation.
Thus the Insurrection Act is not some evil thing in and of itself. The current fear is that Donald Trump will misuse it, as he misuses so many governmental powers (the imposition of tariffs etc.) for the purpose of economic ignorance, revenge, or partisanship.
So people are rightly concerned that at some point, Trump will look at street demonstrations and a little bit of street fighting against ICE, and make that an excuse to send in the army. I think people have this imaginary vision of the Minnesota state legislature and the governor being led out in handcuffs and locked up somewhere. And people are entitled to think these thoughts in response to the outrageous comments coming from Kristi Noem and other members of the Trump administration.
The extended version of the obsession is that Trump would then take advantage of the Insurrection Act to create the equivalent of a military dictatorship, or at least a Trumpian oligarchical dictatorship.
It’s not an entirely irrational concern. After all, this administration has killed unidentified sailors on small boats as well as dozens of Venezuelans in the recent invasion. The permanent separation of children from their parents in the previous term is another marker. The fact that Trump and his supporters routinely break the law and have now ramped up the ICE policy so as to allow cold blooded murder can’t fail to gain peoples’ attention. And of course we have to consider such actions in light of Trump’s obviously failing mental faculties.
We can imagine a couple of alternative versions of the use of the Insurrection Act by Trump. The first would be the lawful use of military forces in a moment of extreme need. This would be some moment of violence and danger to the public safety which could not be countered by local and state enforcement. Not so surprisingly, we haven’t seen any such thing in the ICE-provoked public demonstrations here in Los Angeles or in Minneapolis.
The other version of the use of the Insurrection Act would be – as imagined above -- the misuse of presidential power. Such behavior would be analogous to the current misuse of the Department of Justice in which it has brought unconvincing indictments against people such as Letitia James – people who Trump sees as his enemies.
But the use of the Insurrection Act to round up Democratic officials and random demonstrators (engaging in lawful protest) would go too far. There would be consequences.
One possible scenario is that the sane people in this country – the defenders of democracy and freedom – would continue to protest nonviolently, in greater and greater numbers, and then, according to the 3.5% rule, the authoritarians currently in power will have to make some accommodation, and freedom will triumph.
The other possibility is that massive violence breaks out and the United States turns reactionary once again.
Note: Even as this is written, the Trump administration is doing a bit of a TACO by sending Tom Homan to Minneapolis. Although the administration is notorious for oscillating back and forth on any given policy, this latest move suggests that even the Trump administration can figure out when bad publicity gets in the way of political power. Perhaps Trump will save the Insurrection Act for another time.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
