WASHINGTON — In the days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, some of President Donald J. Trump’s most extreme allies and members of right-wing militia groups urged him to use his power as commander in chief to push the military. office.
As the House committee investigating last year’s riots uncovers new evidence about how far Mr. Trump was willing to go to remain in power, some lawmakers on the panel have quietly begun discussions about the rewrite. of the Insurrection Act, the law of 1807 that gave presidents broad authority to deploy the military in the United States to respond to an insurrection.
Discussions are tentative and debate over the law is fraught in the wake of Mr Trump’s presidency. Proponents envision a doomsday scenario in which a rogue future president could try to use the military to foment – rather than crush – a rebellion or abuse protesters. But skeptics worry about depriving a president of the power to quickly deploy armed forces in the event of an insurgency, as presidents did during the Civil War and the Civil Rights Age.
While Trump has never invoked the law, he threatened to do so in 2020 to force the military to crack down on crowds protesting the police killing of George Floyd. Stephen Miller, one of his top advisers, also suggested putting it into effect to send migrants back to the southwestern border, an idea that was rejected by Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper at the time.
And as Mr. Trump looked for ways to reverse his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, some far-right advisers encouraged him to declare martial law and deploy US troops to seize voting machines. In the run-up to the Jan. 6 attack, members of right-wing militia groups also encouraged Mr. Trump to invoke the law, believing he was about to give them permission to come to Washington with weapons to enter his territory. to fight. On behalf of.
“Many of us believe that the Insurrection Act, which the former president threatened to invoke multiple times in 2020, is under review,” said California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, a member of the committee on Jan. 6. †
While there is no evidence that Mr Trump intended to invoke the law to remain in office, people close to him urged him to do so. Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, attended a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, where participants discussed how voting machines were confiscated, a national emergency was declared, and certain emergency powers were invoked. for national security. That meeting came after Mr Flynn gave an interview to the right-wing television network Newsmax, in which he spoke of a claimed precedent for deploying troops and declaring martial law to “repeat” the election.
The idea was also floated by Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s political aide and confidant, who told conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in an interview that Mr. Trump should consider invoking the Insurrection Act.
In the weeks before the riots, the idea was rife among militia members and other far-right supporters of Mr Trump. It has repeatedly surfaced as evidence that federal prosectors and the House Committee obtained during their investigation into the Capitol attack.
In December 2020, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia group, wrote an open letter to Mr. Trump calling on the president to “use the Insurrection Act to ‘stop the theft'”, confiscate voting data and order a new election.
“It is clear that an unlawful combination and conspiracy in multiple states (indeed, in every state) has acted to deprive the people of the fundamental right to vote for their representatives in a clear, fair election,” Mr Rhodes wrote, adding: “You, and you alone, are fully authorized by the Insurrection Act to determine that such a situation exists and to use the United States military and militia to rectify that situation.”
In text messages and social media posts prior to the Capitol riot, other Oath Keepers members also discussed the possibility that Mr. Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act. Two of them, Jessica Watkins and Kelly Meggs, the head of the militia’s Florida branch, have been charged in connection with the attack.
And Mr. Rhodes sent gunmen to a Virginia hotel on Jan. 6 to await Mr. Trump’s order, which the militia leader said would lift arms restrictions in Washington and allow the group to take up arms and for to fight the president.
The House Committee, which interviewed more than 850 witnesses, is tasked with writing an authoritative report on the events leading up to the Jan. 6 violence and drafting legislative recommendations to try to protect American democracy from a repeat. While their recommendations are likely to get a lot of attention, they’re not guaranteed to become law.
One of those recommendations is almost certainly a revision of the Electoral Count Act, which Trump and his allies tried to use to undo the 2020 election. In recent weeks, the panel has begun discussing whether to call for revisions to the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy troops to suppress “any insurgency, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.”
The changes under discussion could add a higher and more detailed threshold for a president to meet before deploying troops domestically, including consultations with Congress.
“Essentially, the former president threatened by tweet to send the armed forces to take over civilian governments because he saw things he didn’t like on TV,” Ms Lofgren said, referring to Mr Trump’s threats to join the insurgency. calling Handel in response to protests against racial justice. “That’s not really the history of use of the law, and perhaps more definition of terms is in order.”
The last time lawmakers turned their attention to a potential revision of the Insurrection Act was after Mr. Trump threatened to invoke it in 2020 to crush protests that spread across the country after a white police officer named Mr Floyd, an unarmed black man, had been murdered in Minnesota.
“If a city or state refuses to take necessary steps to defend the lives and property of their residents, I will deploy the United States military and quickly resolve the problem for them,” Trump said at the time. White House officials have issued a proclamation to invoke the Insurrection Act in the event the president pushes through the threat.
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Debating a criminal referral. The Jan. 6 commission has become divided over whether former President Donald J. Trump should be criminally referred to the Justice Department, even though it has concluded that she has sufficient evidence to do so. The debate revolves around whether a referral would backfire by politically sullying the expanding federal investigation.
Civil rights advocates reacted with alarm, and Democrats in Congress rushed to try to curtail Trump’s power.
A group of Senate Democrats led by Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal proposed legislation that would require the president to consult Congress before deploying troops and clarified that the Insurrection Act could not be invoked to curtail civil rights. The bill never made it to the Senate, which was then controlled by Republicans.
The Democratic-controlled House added similar restrictions to the annual defense policy law last year, but the restrictions were removed from legislation before it became law.
Republicans have insisted that Congress not amend the Insurrection Act, arguing that consultations with lawmakers would delay a president when quick action might be needed.
“A president could not act quickly and decisively in the case of riots that are not controlled at the state or municipal level,” Colorado Republican Representative Doug Lamborn said during a 2020 floor debate, adding: “This is necessary action to maintain internal peace would hinder and delay.”
Mr. Esper, who opposed deploying troops on US streets and was fired by Mr. Trump as secretary of defense, also told a congressional committee in 2020 that he was not in favor of changing the law.
“My view is that nothing has happened that seems compelling to me to change it at this point,” Mr Esper said, adding that the law “held up well over time.”
The law dates back to the early 1800s, when President Thomas Jefferson signed it out of concern that Aaron Burr, his former vice president, was planning to raise an army.
President Andrew Jackson used the act in 1831 to crush Nat Turner’s uprising of enslaved people. President Abraham Lincoln invoked it during the Civil War. President John F. Kennedy used the law to send troops to enforce the desegregation of public schools in Alabama, and President Lyndon B. Johnson invoked it to protect civil rights protesters in Selma, Ala.