The 'uniquely dangerous' law Trump could abuse in his second term

Two legal experts are warning about the potential for severe use of the Insurrection Act should former President Donald Trump win a second term in office.

Writing in the New York Times, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith argue that the Insurrection Act is a "uniquely dangerous" law that Congress should reform even if there were not a threat of a second Trump presidency.

"The Insurrection Act empowers the president to order the armed forces and state militias into action within the United States and against American citizens in numerous ill-defined circumstances," they explain. "The problem is that the act has very broad and imprecise triggers to its operation and no temporal constraints, and it does not specify any role for Congress to assess, shape or limit the president’s response to an emergency."

The authors then note that Congress came together on a bipartisan basis last year to reform the Electoral Count Act in response to Trump's efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally throw out certified election results based on ambiguities in the law, and they think that should set a precedent for acting now to fix the Insurrection Act.

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The authors then outlined key changes that should be made to the law, and they say that the most crucial would be placing "a relatively short sunset provision on a president’s invocation of the act — weeks, not months — subject to additional short-term continued deployments approved by Congress," as at the moment the act gives the president powers to deploy troops domestically for an indeterminate amount of time.

"These simple changes would constitute a historic reform and would be far better than no reform at all," they conclude. "The primary and urgent task is to bring the core of the president’s promiscuous Insurrection Act authority to heel."