Douglas V. Gibbs ——Bio and Archives--December 27, 2025

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The progressive left’s play with words just shot them in the foot. The Democrats and their socialist allies depend upon optics more than truth, so they parse words in the hope of making you have one perception when the reality might be something different. With that in mind, in retaliation against Trump’s use of the National Guard to assist ICE in the execution of immigration law, they call it the use of the military in our cities. They want the reasons behind the passage of the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878 to bubble fearfully inside your head.

The Posse Comitatus law came at the end of Reconstruction to limit the use of the U.S. Army after it was used to occupy The South after the War Between the States. The term posse comitatus is Latin for “power of the country,” referring to citizens having the preferred option of calling upon the sheriff, local law enforcement, and if necessary the local militia to keep the peace rather than a standing army under the control of the federal government. The law was passed after pressure from Southern Democrats calling for restrictions on the use of the military in internal affairs. The act also reflected a long-standing suspicion that was shared by the Founding Fathers of the use of standing armies to enforce civilian law, which is also rooted in English common law and colonial history.

The Democrats, from day one of Donald Trump’s presidency, have argued he is a wannabe dictator willing to use the force of the federal government in an authoritarian manner, so when he sought to deploy the National Guard to assist in the execution of immigration law, his opponents saw their opportunity and screamed that he was using the military against the American People. According to Congress, there are exceptions to the domestic use of the military by the federal government, like:

Basically, the understanding in American Law is that the military may be used to assist, but generally they have no policing powers (arrest, search, seizure, or investigation of civilians unless authorized by law).

In the past, the use of the military domestically has become a topic of debate during times of major riots, civil unrest, border enforcement strategies, pandemic or natural disaster responses, and terrorism events........

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