When speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, June 10, President Donald Trump left the door open to invoking the Insurrection Act as a means of cracking down on the ongoing riots in Los Angeles and potential riots in other cities, a continuation of other comments he has recently made about the issue.
For reference, the Insurrection Act was enacted in 1807 and grants the President of the United States the authority to use the military to put down domestic rebellions, insurrections, or other instances of disorder so severe that federal laws cannot be enforced because of obstruction. That could be the case with these riots, given how the mobs of rioters are attempting to block ICE from doing its job.
President Trump has, perhaps in order to lay the groundwork for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in the military to crack down on the Mexican flag-waving, American flag-burning rioters in LA, referred to those highly visible rioters as “insurrectionists,” a comment that has set of leftists and enlivened the right.
For example, at one point the president told reporters that the riots are being carried on by professional rioters who are “insurrectionists” who ought be in jail. He said, “The people that are causing the problem are professional agitators, they’re insurrectionists, they’re bad people, they should be in jail.”
So, speaking to reporters about the matter on Tuesday, the president explained that he would invoke the Insurrection Act to put down those insurrectionists, as the riots are “terrible.” He said, “If there’s an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it. We’ll see. But I can tell you last night was terrible, and the night before that was terrible.”
In making that comment, President Trump left the door open to invoking the act without unnecessarily committing himself to a potentially unpopular or left-galvanizing move that might be better to avoid if the police and National Guard can keep a handle on things. Watch him here:
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Predictably, the left has gone absolutely berserk over the president’s use of the term “insurrectionist” and seeming desire to invoke the Insurrection Act. For example, CNN anchor Dana Bash said, after he commented on the “professional agitators” being “insurrectionists,” “That word he used — they’re insurrectionists. I can’t imagine that that was an accident, because it seems as though that is the place that the White House is trying to get.”
Continuing, the CNN anchor noted that being able to deploy the military to California and humiliate Governor Newsom by doing so is something that Trump is seemingly quite interested in, saying, “And for the president, it’s icing on the cake. That he can do it in the state of California, because on a whole host of issues, he has had California — Gavin Newsom in particular — in his sights.”
Joining her in that pearl-clutching, CNN analyst Stephen Collinson commented on the meaning of the “insurrectionist” term, saying, “This is a very serious word being thrown around,” he said. “Insurrection is not something to be trifled with. If the President were to invoke the Insurrection Act, we’d have yet another legal morass.”
Watch them here: