What happened the last time a U.S. president overrode a state to deploy the National Guard
CBC
On an unseasonably chilly but sunny day, March 20, 1965, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson stood on the porch of his Texas ranch and read a telegram he had just sent to Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
"I am calling into federal service selected units of the Alabama National Guard… to help you meet your state responsibilities," Johnson said.
For more than a week, Johnson and Wallace had been going back and forth about the president's concerns for the safety of Black Alabamians trying to exercise their right to vote and peacefully protest police brutality.
Wallace, a segregationist, refused to call in his state's National Guard to protect the Black protesters — who had planned a march from Selma to Montgomery — so Johnson did it in his place.
To do so, Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act, an 18th century law that allows the president to deploy military forces inside the U.S.
It's what many legal scholars and democracy watchers believed U.S. President Donald Trump might one day use to clamp down on dissent against his administration's policies.
For the first time since Johnson, Trump on Saturday overrode a state's authority and called up its National Guard to quell protests in Los Angeles over recent raids by federal immigration authorities. He sent 2,000 members of the California National Guard into the city on Saturday.
But Trump used a more obscure law, Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which allows the president to federalize National Guard units in case of an invasion, rebellion, or when police are unable to enforce the country's laws.
"It was a bit of a surprise attack," said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University who specializes in new autocracies.
"I think it was something for which Trump's opposition was less well prepared legally."
Another law, 1878's Posse Comitatus Act, generally forbids the U.S. military, including the National Guard, from taking part in civilian law enforcement.
Title 10 does not override that prohibition, but allows the troops to protect federal agents who are carrying out law enforcement activity and to protect federal property.
For example, National Guard troops cannot arrest protesters, but they could protect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who are carrying out arrests.
What has worried legal scholars in Scheppele's circles even more, though, is that Trump's proclamation deploying the National Guard made no mention of California or a specific time period.
