Chicago On Guard: Trump’s Looming Fascist Invasion |
Image by Levi Meir Clancy.
I was talking to a journalist the other day and we were both stumped on what formal legal justification, if any, the demented fascist leader Trump – really Trump’s operatives under the direction of the top fascist strategist Stephen Miller – might be using to act on Herr Donald’s threat to bring federal troops into Chicago.
It seems a bit of a mystery. For better or worse, Trump possesses the legal authority for his deployment of National Guard troops in Washington DC. The president of the United States has formal “home rule” power over the nation’s capital city. There’s no mystery about the authority he has invoked in DC.
But what about all the rest of the big majority-nonwhite and Democratic Party-run cities that Trump and other Republifascists hate and want to bring under military domination, citing their determination to subdue supposedly out-of-control urban crime?
The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act makes it illegal to deploy federal troops on domestic soil for policing purposes, right?
Not quite. The (slaveowners’)1807 Insurrection Act is a “statutory exception” to Posse Comitatus. It empowers the White House to deploy the U.S. military and federalize National Guard units of individual states to suppress “civil disorder,” “insurrection,” and/or “armed rebellion” against the federal government anywhere in the country. The first US president named George Bush invoked the Insurrection Act to suppress the 1992 Rodney King Rebellion in Los Angeles.
Then there’s Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which permits a US president to call National Guard units into domestic policing under certain circumstances, including “a rebellion against the authority of the federal government.”[1] The Trump team invoked this second “statutory exception” to Posse Comitatus (section 12406) to “justify” sending 4000 members of the California National Guard and even 700 US Marines (the latter under less clear authority) to Los Angeles last June. In doing so, the fascist White House absurdly claimed that strident and unarmed anti-ICE protests in 4 square miles of the 500-square-mile city of Los Angeles constituted a “rebellion against the US government.”
A federal district judge has ruled Trump’s use of military force in Los Angeles illegal, observing that no such rebellion remotely existed, but that judgement has been blocked by a federal appeals court.
But what about Chicago? There’s nothing remotely like an insurrection or a “rebellion against the US government” going on in Chicago. There’s just........