WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump says he'd consider invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to fight crime and battle protesters in Democratic-controlled cities.
"I'd do it if it was necessary," if courts block his deployment of National Guard troops, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Oct. 6. "So far, it hasn't been necessary. But we have an Insurrection Act for a reason. If I had to enact it, I'd do that."
"It's been invoked before," Trump told reporters a day later. "We want safe cities."
The Insurrection Act, or its precedessors, have been invoked 30 times in American history since George Washington suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. The last time it was used was George H.W. Bush's defense of Los Angeles during the 1992 riots.
The law gives the president the power to deploy U.S. armed forces to suppress rebellions and civil unrest or when federal laws are being obstructed. Presidents have rarely deployed troops domestically against the wishes of state and local leaders - even though they have the authority to do so.
When presidents have used that power against the wishes of state or local officials, it was in response to those officials not enforcing Supreme Court decisions and federal laws - or failing to quell an insurrection against the government.
"The last time presidents invoked it against the wishes of state leaders was to suppress violent massive resistance to civil rights in the 1950s and '60s," presidential historian Matt Dallek told USA TODAY.
"Presidents have a duty under Article Two to take care that the laws are faithfully executed," Claire Finkelstein, a University of Pennsylvania law school professor noted.
Since America "became a multiracial democracy in the mid-sixties," Dallek said, the Insurrection Act has been used only once, under extraordinary circumstances and at the California governor's request, to quell widespread riots in Los Angeles in 1992.
Trump threatened to invoke the act during his first term in 2020 but pulled back when Defense Secretary Mark Esper publicly opposed the move. In this term, Trump has invoked other statutes to deploy the National Guard and even the U.S. military to states such as California and Illinois against the wishes of those governors.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Here are some of the more notable uses of the Insurrection Act, usually to quell rebellions or in cases where local or state authorities were unable or unwilling to maintain order or uphold the Constitution.
While this was before the Insurrection Act existed, and helped lead to its creation, President George Washington invoked the Militia Acts of 1792 to put down an armed uprising in western Pennsylvania where farmers were rebelling against a federal whiskey tax.
Washington is said to have personally led more than 10,000 militia troops in what is believed to be the first - and only - time a sitting president has commanded troops in the field. The federal response quashed the rebellion without significant bloodshed and was seen as an important precedent in how the federal government could - and would - use the military if needed on U.S. soil to enforce its laws.
President Thomas Jefferson signed the Insurrection Act into law after Congress formalized the principle established by Washington 15 years earlier. It authorized presidents to use the U.S. military - an Army and Navy at the time - to suppress insurrections and rebellions and enforce federal law when and where it was being obstructed.
Specifically, the Insurrection Act allowed the President to act unilaterally to federalize the militia of any state, and to use the armed forces, and to deploy them in response to requests by governors or state legislatures.
Jefferson did so in part to respond to efforts by the vice president in his first term, Aaron Burr, to muster a private army and seize land in the Southwest after his duel with Alexander Hamilton ruined his political career.
President Abraham Lincoln invoked the Insurrection Act on April 15, 1861 to call up 75,000 militia troops following the secession of 11 Southern states and the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. His effort to suppress the rebellion and restore federal authority marked the beginning of the Civil War.
Lincoln's response ultimately became the biggest and longest use of presidential military power on U.S. soil in history, as Union and Confederate forces clashed in battles that also tested the limits of executive power.
In the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, President Ulysses S. Grant invoked the Insurrection Act and recently established related laws multiple times to combat widespread white supremacist terrorism targeting Black people and their newfound civil and political rights.
On Oct. 17, 1871, Grant sent federal troops into South Carolina to suppress Ku Klux Klan violence using the new Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which allowed him to suspend habeas corpus to fight the domestic terror organization. Grant's troops arrested hundreds of Klansmen, effectively dismantling the organization. He later intervened in Louisiana, Arkansas and then in South Carolina in the run-up to the 1876 election to quell violence by white supremacist paramilitary groups known as "rifle clubs."
President Grover Cleveland deployed federal troops to Illinois - over the governor's objections - to break the Pullman railway strike that he said was interfering with interstate commerce and mail delivery. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson invoked the Insurrection Act to combat a Colorado labor uprising, and President Warren Harding invoked it in 1921 to quell a labor uprising by coal miners in West Virginia.
President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the National Guard, and deployed the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, to enforce desegregation in Arkansas after Gov. Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block nine Black students from entering a Little Rock high school.
President John F. Kennedy invoked the Act to enforce federal desegregation orders at the University of Mississippi in 1962 and again in 1963 after Gov. George Wallace said he would "stand in the schoolhouse door" to block the admission of two Black students to the all-white University of Alabama. President Lyndon B. Johnson invoked the Act to send troops into Detroit during the 1967 riots and again in 1968 - in cities including Washington, Baltimore, and Chicago - to quell unrest after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
President George H.W. Bush invoked the Act on May 1, 1992 after the acquittal of LAPD officers who severely beat Black motorist Rodney King sparked rioting in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. Bush deployed the National Guard and U.S. troops to restore order after California Gov. Pete Wilson and Mayor Tom Bradley requested federal assistance.
The riots, which were also a response to longstanding and pent-up racial tensions, caused widespread looting, prolonged shootouts, arson fires and violence in the city. At least 53 people were killed, with more than 2,380 injured and 12,000 arrested. Property damage estimates of more than $1 billion at the time made it the most destructive period of local unrest in U.S. history.