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The contentions that invocation of the Insurrection Act would be unconstitutional, unlawful, or unprecedented are legally and historically ignorant. And how ironic is the notion that a president’s doing so over the objection of state governments would be racist? Historically, the president’s power has been deployed against the forces of racism that state governments either could not suppress or actually supported — in response to the Ku Klux Klan after passage of the 1871 Civil Rights Act, and to enforce desegregation and civil rights in the years following the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And the law has been invoked on other occasions to help police restore order after extensive rioting has broken out, such as in Detroit in the late 1960s and Los Angeles in 1992.
Relying on this detailed history and statutory law, Senator Cotton posited that deploying military forces to assist police and protect Americans besieged by rioters and looters does not establish martial law, much less end democracy. That is true, as is his related assertion that such deployments do not violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 — a law that generally bars the military from civilian law-enforcement functions, but that expressly prescribes exceptions, which include the Insurrection Act.
Can we be honest? I don’t know, since honesty implies, along with good faith, a common ground for assimilating basic reality. Assuming we can be honest, we know, as the Times knew thanks to meticulous scrutiny, that Cotton was right . . . about his underlying facts.
That doesn’t make the opinion he formulates from them right. He could be well informed yet wrong. It may be, as many forcefully argue, that state-government approval as a prerequisite to federal intrusions to quell domestic violence should be required, based on both the express terms of the Constitution’s Article IV and the Framers’ preference for state sovereignty over intrastate affairs. It could be that, as others insist, the kind of upheaval we are currently witnessing traces to deep-seated societal problems that can be effectively addressed only by a cooperative federal-state response. It may be, as Trump critics contend, that unilateral federal action, coupled with gratuitously provocative presidential rhetoric, is more apt to exacerbate than ameliorate the crisis. Or it could be, as some Trump supporters counter, that having been governed by progressive Democrats for decades, big cities are seething because of toxicities of their own making, and that there can be no lasting solutions until they shoulder the consequences and take responsibility for fixing them.
There are a plethora of other possibilities, no doubt. That’s how it is with opinion, and with the op-ed pages of a vaunted “Newspaper of Record.” But not with fact.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/what-is-fact-checking-without-facts/