Trump's military deployment in California is a radical departure from history
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Going forward, however, the Trump administration is
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Bush invoked the Insurrection Act in 1992, but again, he did so upon the request of the California governor. While the Insurrection Act has been sparingly invoked, Bush's move was consistent with prior applications in similar contexts. When state governors have requested federal military intervention under the act, they have consistently done so amid inflamed racial tensions that erupted into violent civil unrest. Such instances include the clash in the 1850s between pro- and anti-slavery forces known as Bleeding Kansas, Chinese expulsion campaigns by white mobs in Washington in the 1880s, the Detroit riots of 1943 and 1967, and the riots in Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
If Trump invokes the act now, he would probably do so unilaterally — in a move that, at least since the turn of the 20th century, would depart from unilateral invocations by past US presidents. In the limited instances when past presidents have invoked the act unilaterally and deployed federal troops over the objection of the state governor, they have done so to enforce the constitutional rights of citizens that were being violated by the state governors themselves — all of whom weaponized states' rights to preserve the Southern 'way of life,' a euphemism for resisting federally mandated desegregation.
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Not incidentally, examples of the use of the Insurrection Act involve federal military enforcement of the civil rights of Black Americans, such as the First Amendment right of civil rights protesters to march from Selma to Montgomery following the brutal assault by Alabama state troopers on marchers known as Bloody Sunday. The Insurrection Act was also applied to enforce the desegregation of public schools in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama — highlighted, respectively, by the military escort of the Little Rock Nine into Central High School, the showdown between federal troops and white segregationists at the University of Mississippi, and the National Guard's deployment in response to Governor George Wallace's stand in the University of Alabama's schoolhouse door, where he was physically blocking two Black students from enrolling.
When past presidents took such unilateral action, they did so hesitantly, as they were sensitive to the public perception of overstepping federal power and encroaching upon state authority. Before eventually deploying
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In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson had communicated his strong preference for Wallace to assume his own authority over the Alabama state National Guard to protect protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery, but Wallace refused. When Johnson ultimately invoked the Insurrection Act,
By contrast, the Trump administration is displaying a propensity to flout state authority and boost federal military power — a situation that is especially remarkable given that belief in minimal federal interference in state affairs is supposed to be one of the hallmarks of conservative politics.
In January 2017, during his first administration, Trump threatened to
Although Trump eventually stood down from his threatened invocation of the act in 2020, the administration's recent threats, together with ICE raids, are ushering in a new era of conflict with states' rights.
Democratic state governors now seek to protect the civil rights of citizens and noncitizens alike from Trump's exercise of federal power to 'Make America Great Again.'
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Newsom, in his attempts to shield the
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The Hill
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