Ensure domestic tranquility
For most of America’s first century, every president understood that one of his core duties was to maintain order. They turned to the Army to do it, sometimes without the authorization of the local government. George Washington personally led a federal army to crush the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 while Pennsylvania’s governor initially resisted calling out his state militia. Sometimes the president acted without Congress’ authorization. John Adams dispatched a federal force to crush another Pennsylvania revolt solely based on his constitutional powers as president.
During the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction, the seeds of federal impotence were planted. The South hated being occupied by the Army. Southern congressmen helped push through the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which purported to restrict the military’s ability to enforce domestic laws.
Yet presidents continued to deploy the military to quell domestic disorder. In 1894, Grover Cleveland sent federal forces to Chicago to enforce an injunction against the labor leader and socialist politician Eugene Debs during a nationwide railroad strike. The next year, the Supreme Court upheld the action, stating “if the emergency arises, the army of the nation, and all its militia, are at the service of the nation to compel obedience to its laws.”
In 1950, amid the Korean War, Harry S. Truman ordered the Army to seize control of a steel mill whose production was disrupted by striking workers. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the high court concluded that was illegal and that the president’s power was at its weakest when Congress actively disagreed. Since then, presidents have been more cautious about deploying the military on U.S. soil.
Yet the legal question is unresolved: When Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to protect African American high school students in Arkansas, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. insisted that “there are grave doubts as to the authority of the Congress to limit the constitutional powers of the president to enforce the laws and preserve the peace under circumstances he deems appropriate.”
Today, the federal government has unjustly taken on vastly more responsibility than the Founders intended, even as it neglects one of its most specific and crucial responsibilities. States can and should experiment with different policies that reflect the wishes of their residents. But if violent disorder arises, the president must intervene to uphold the law and protect the republic.