President Donald Trump keeps toying with the use of the Insurrection Act to essentially declare an emergency state that mobilizes military forces in American cities — something he has considered many times in the past, even to potentially seize voting machines after his election loss in 2020.
But he just “blurted out” the real reason he loves the idea, Greg Sargent wrote for The New Republic in an analysis published Wednesday — and it’s incredibly revealing.
Specifically, Trump told right-wing anchor Katie Pavlich on NewsNation, “I don’t think it is [time to invoke it] yet. It might be at some point. It does make life a lot easier. You don’t go through the court system. It’s just a much easier thing to do.”
In other words, Sargent wrote, Trump sees the Insurrection Act as a free pass to go around the courts, a longtime frustration as judges have blocked dozens of his actions as illegal.
The problem for Trump, he continued, is that the Insurrection Act “emphatically does not mean Trump can evade the courts. Anything Trump orders the military to do will also be subject to legal limits. As Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck emails me: ‘The same laws and the specter of judicial review that constrains what civilian law enforcement agencies can do will also constrain anything the military can do.’”
On the contrary, he pointed out, states like Minnesota would immediately sue to block the use of the Insurrection Act, so it would hardly put him out of legal reach. Nonetheless, said Sargent, “Trump believes the act provides him license to circumvent the judiciary … So this is really a window into Trump’s fantasies about presiding over martial law, or over a military dictatorship.”
“The fascists around Trump want us to think Trump will circumvent the courts,” wrote Sargent. “They want to create the impression that he’s fully capable of presiding over a military dictatorship. They think that will cow Americans and institutions into compliance. But if recent events tell us one thing, it’s this: That absolutely, emphatically is not going to happen.”
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