Insurrection

In this time of being cloistered, secluded, sheltered, sequestered, shielded, protected, shutoff, isolated, withdrawn, confined, restricted, insulated, reclusive, retiring, unworldly, or solitary during the pandemic one might wonder what would happen if after an election there was an insurrection?

 

A rebellion, uprising, or insurrection is a refusal of obedience or order. It refers to the open resistance against the orders of an established authority.

 

Article I, Section 8, Clause 15:

[The Congress shall have Power . . .] To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; . . .

The states as well as Congress may prescribe penalties for failure to obey the President’s call of the militia. They also have a concurrent power to aid the National Government by calls under their own authority, and in emergencies may use the militia to put down armed insurrection.

 The Federal Government may call out the militia in case of civil war; its authority to suppress rebellion is found in the power to suppress insurrection and to carry on war.

The act of February 28, 1795, which delegated to the President the power to call out the militia, was held constitutional.

 A militiaman who refused to obey such a call was not employed in the service of the United States so as to be subject to the article of war, but was liable to be tried for disobedience of the act of 1795.

The act provides a “statutory exception” to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which limits the use of military personnel under federal command for law enforcement purposes within the United States. ... There are Constitutional exceptions to Posse Comitatus restrictions rooted in the President's own constitutional authority.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 is a United States federal law (10 U.S.C. §§ 251–255; prior to 2016, 10 U.S.C. §§ 331–335; amended 2006, 2007) that empowers the President of the United States to deploy U.S. military and federalized National Guard troops within the United States in particular circumstances, such as to suppress civil disorder, insurrection and rebellion.

The act provides a “statutory exception” to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which limits the use of military personnel under federal command for law enforcement purposes within the United States.

Before invoking the powers under the Act, 10 U.S.C. § 254 requires the President to first publish a proclamation ordering the insurgents to disperse. As part of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, these provisions are now codified as amended.

There are Constitutional exceptions to Posse Comitatus restrictions rooted in the President’s own constitutional authority. Defense Department guidelines describe “homeland defense” as a “constitutional exception” to Posse Comitatus restriction, meaning that measures necessary to guarantee National Security from external threats are not subject to the same limitations.

The chief clause of the Insurrection Act, in its original 1807 verbiage (which has been thoroughly updated since to reflect modern legalese), reads:

“An Act authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States, in cases of insurrections Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the pre-requisites of the law in that respect.”

In 2016, Public Law 114-328 was amended to include Guam and the US Virgin Islands under Ch. 13 jurisdiction. §252: “Use of militia and armed forces to enforce Federal authority” currently reads:

“Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.”

 

When a group of people or nations form an alliance, it is called a confederation, allowing each member to govern it but agreeing to work together for common causes. ... Whereas a federation has a strong central government, a confederation is more of an agreement between separate bodies to cooperate with each other.

By definition the difference between a confederation and a federation is that the membership of the member states in a confederation is voluntary, while the membership in a federation is not.

Sometimes confederation is erroneously used in the place of federation. Some nations, which started out as confederations, retained the word in their titles after officially becoming federations, such as Switzerland. The United States of America was a confederation before it became a federation with the ratification of the current U.S. constitution in 1788.

A confederation (also known as a confederacy or league) is a union of sovereign groups or states united for purposes of common action. Usually created by a treaty, confederations of states tend to be established for dealing with critical issues, such as defense, foreign relations, internal trade or currency, with the general government being required to provide support for all its members. Confederacies represent a main form of intergovernmental, which is defined as any form of interaction between states, which takes place on the basis of sovereign independence or government.

The nature of the relationship among the member states constituting a confederation varies considerably. Likewise, the relationship between the member states and the general government and the distribution of powers among them varies. Some looser confederations are similar to international organizations. Other confederations with stricter rules may resemble federal systems.

Since the member states of a confederation retain their sovereignty, they have an implicit right of secession. The political philosopher Emmerich de Vattel observed, “Several sovereign and independent states may unite themselves together by a perpetual confederacy without each in particular ceasing to be a perfect state.... The deliberations in common will offer no violence to the sovereignty of each member”.

Under a confederation, unlike a federal state, the central authority is relatively weak. Decisions made by the general government in a unicameral legislature, a council of the member states, require subsequent implementation by the member states to take effect; they are not laws acting directly upon the individual but have more the character of interstate agreements. Also, decision-making in the general government usually proceeds by consensus (unanimity), not by majority. Historically, those features limit the effectiveness of the union and so political pressure tends to build over time for the transition to a federal system of government, as happened in the American, Swiss and German cases of regional integration.

In the context of the history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, a confederacy may refer to a semi-permanent political and military alliance consisting of multiple nations (or “tribes”, “bands”, or “villages”), which maintained their separate leadership. One of the most well-known is the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois), but there were many others during different eras and locations across North America, such as the Wabanaki Confederacy, Western Confederacy, Powhatan, Seven Nations of Canada, Pontiac's Confederacy, Illinois Confederation, Tecumseh's Confederacy, Great Sioux Nation, Blackfoot Confederacy, Iron Confederacy and Council of Three Fires.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, historically known as the Iroquois League or the League of Five (later Six) Nations, is the country of Native Americans (in what is now the United States) and First Nations (in what is now Canada) that consists of six nations: the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, the Seneca and the Tuscarora. The Six Nations have a representative government known as the Grand Council which is the oldest governmental institution still maintaining its original form in North America. Each clan from the five nations sends chiefs to act as representatives and make decisions for the whole confederation. It has been operating since its foundation in 1142 despite limited international recognition today. In fact, Haudenosaunee issues passports for its citizens though travelers often face problems crossing state borders.

 

The Confederate States of America (CSA), commonly referred to as the Confederate States (C.S. or CS) or the Confederacy, was an unrecognized breakaway state that fought against the United States during the American Civil War.

The Confederacy was originally formed by the secession of seven slave states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, and was in existence from 1861 to 1865. All of them are in the Lower South region of the United States, whose economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture—particularly cotton—and a plantation system that relied upon enslaved African Americans for labor. Convinced that white supremacy and the institution of slavery were threatened by the November 1860 election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, the Confederacy declared its secession in rebellion against the United States, with the loyal states becoming known as the Union during the ensuing American Civil War. In a speech known today as the Cornerstone Address, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens described its ideology as being centrally based "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition".

Before Lincoln took office in March 1861, a new Confederate government was established in February. It was considered illegal by the United States federal government, and many Northerners thought of the Confederates as traitors. The Confederate states volunteered militia units, and the new government formed its own Confederate States Army practically overnight. After war began in April, four slave states of the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—also seceded and joined the Confederacy. The Confederacy later accepted the slave states of Missouri and Kentucky as members, although neither officially declared secession nor were they ever largely controlled by Confederate forces, despite the efforts of Confederate shadow governments which were eventually expelled. The government of the United States (the Union) rejected the claims of secession as illegitimate.

The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter, a Union fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. No foreign government ever recognized the Confederacy as an independent country, although Great Britain and France granted it belligerent status, which allowed Confederate agents to contract with private concerns for arms and other supplies.

In 1865, after four years of heavy fighting and 620,000–850,000 military deaths, all confederate land and naval forces either surrendered or otherwise ceased hostilities. The war lacked a formal end, with Confederate forces surrendering or disbanding sporadically throughout most of 1865. The most significant capitulation was Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, after which any lingering doubt regarding the war’s outcome and/or the Confederacy’s prospect for survival was extinguished, although another sizable force under Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston did not formally surrender to William T. Sherman until April 26. The Confederacy’s civilian government also disintegrated in a chaotic manner - the Confederate States Congress effectively ceased to exist as a legislative body following its final adjournment sine die on March 18 while Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s administration declared the Confederacy dissolved on May 5, and Davis himself acknowledged in later writings that the Confederacy “disappeared” in 1865. Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln on April 15, 1865.

After the war, Confederate states were readmitted to the Union during the Reconstruction era, after each ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery. “Lost Cause” ideology—an idealized view of the Confederacy as valiantly fighting for a just cause—emerged in the decades after the war among former Confederate generals and politicians, as well as organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Particularly intense periods of Lost Cause activity came around the time of World War I, as the last Confederate veterans began to die and a push was made to preserve their memory, and then during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in reaction to growing public support for racial equality. Through activities such as building prominent Confederate monuments and writing school history textbooks to paint the Confederacy in a favorable light, Lost Cause advocates sought to ensure future generations of Southern whites would continue to support white supremacist policies such as the Jim Crow laws. The modern display of Confederate flags primarily started in the late 1940s with Senator Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, and has continued to the present day.

 

That is what history says.

 

Today people are marching in the streets and some are carrying weapons. The causes range from police brutality to pay inequality to ancient history to housing disparage to unequal education. Throw on top of all that this Corovid-19 virus that has shut down business and recreation and the enjoyment of life. Try and find an answer through the maze and count the numbers.

 

The real life anger and frustration captured on videophones and spread through the screens with additional comments to fuel the fire makes one wonder.

When or how will it end?

If you watch a fearful movie, how long does it take for you to calm down or do you have nightmares? When you wake up the next morning and the movie is still going?

Once cooler weather comes and we scramble into shelter, will we get absorbed into screen time to increase our bias and become more enraged at things we cannot change.

In a month two formidable armies will face off in a spitting match called voting for a democracy with no certain winners.

Then what?

 

This is not a forecast of doom and gloom, but of a possibility.