CNN's Daniel Dale thoroughly fact-checked President Donald Trump's false claims about the Insurrection Act, which he's threatened to invoke to deploy troops into cities across the country.
A collection of laws passed early in American history grant presidents broad authority to deploy active-duty and National Guard troops to states under certain conditions to perform domestic law enforcement, but Dale told "CNN News Central" that Trump has misrepresented both history and federal law as he muses about invoking the act.
"The Insurrection Act is an old law, or really a collection of 18th-century and 19th-century laws that allows the president to deploy both National Guard and active duty troops to U.S. states If certain very vague conditions are met, and to have those troops perform the domestic law enforcement duties from which they're normally prohibited," Dale said. "So it's a broad law, it's a powerful law. It does not shut down the courts, in general, they would continue functioning, and nor does it mean that even lawsuits about the president's decision to invoke the Insurrection Act would not be heard by the courts."
"I spoke to legal experts who said courts would certainly consider such lawsuits, that lawsuits would almost inevitably come and be heard," Dale added. "Now, they did emphasize that such lawsuits would be likely difficult for challengers to win, given how sweeping and how deferential to the president these old laws are."
The Supreme Court ruled in 1827 that the president alone has the authority to determine whether a situation requires the domestic deployment of "the militia," but there's active debate on how that would apply to Trump's situation.
"Those issues would be hashed out by the courts, in the courts, it's not like the courts would not consider them at all," Dale said.
Trump has claimed that nearly half of all presidents have invoked the Insurrection Act, and he said one president had invoked it 28 times, but Dale said that's false.
"Both of those are wrong, as well," he said. "So I looked into the 28 times thing. New York university's Brennan Center for Justice did some research in 2022, found that no president had invoked the act more than Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s. That was six times – nowhere close to 28, amid white supremacist violence after the Civil War. The act in total has been invoked about 30 times in American history. So again, no president, even close to 28 times. The Brennan Center also found that 17 of the 45 men who have served as president have invoked the act or one of its precursor laws. That's about 38 percent, so President Trump's, like, 50 percent [claim] is at least a slight exaggeration."
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