Congress Should Make It Harder to Abuse the Insurrection Act

Even if the administration has temporarily backed off threats to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests in Minnesota, the idea will come up again. That’s partly because the power — which would allow the president to use active-duty troops to conduct domestic law enforcement — is dangerously vulnerable to abuse.

What’s known as the Insurrection Act is actually a set of statutes enacted by Congress between 1792 and 1871. Under certain conditions, they allow the president to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act’s injunction against using the military for civilian law enforcement — say, if asked by a state for help in suppressing unrest, or if the White House deems that any insurrection or violence is preventing the exercise of federal laws. In the continental US, the act was invoked most recently in 1992, to restore order during the Los Angeles riots, and before that to enforce desegregation and civil-rights laws in the 1960s.