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The Insurrection Act was central at the start of the Civil War when Abraham Lincoln federalized forces to suppress secession.
The Insurrection Act has been invoked intermittently since the early republic, with sources counting roughly 30 separate invocations over U.S. history and attributing those uses to somewhere between 1...
Yes — both legally and historically the United States can hold a presidential election while at war: the Constitution fixes election dates, Congress and the states run the process, and U.S. history re...
No U.S. president has ever canceled or postponed a presidential election, and federal law and constitutional structure make unilateral deferral by the executive effectively impossible; even during the...
can and has held presidential elections during wartime; historical precedent includes contests during the , the and , and scholars note that U.S. elections during conflict have generally proceeded on ...
A war by itself does not legally permit the cancellation of U.S. federal elections: Congress fixed the presidential election date in statute in 1845 and precedent and experts say no president can unil...
The Insurrection Act, a federal statute first enacted in 1807, has been invoked roughly 30 times across U.S. history to authorize deployment of federal troops or federalization of state militias to su...
Expulsion of a Member of Congress is an extraordinary, constitutionally authorized sanction: Article I, Section 5 gives each chamber the power to "punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with...
The Revenue Act of 1862 broadened the federal tax base far beyond the short-lived 1861 income provision by levying excise duties on many retail and business items, instituting the nation’s first susta...
Scholars most often place James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Warren G. Harding and Franklin Pierce (and in many recent surveys William Henry Harrison and Herbert Hoover) below Donald Trump, though the ex...
The has been a sporadically used but consequential statutory doorway for presidents to deploy federal troops on soil — invoked about 30 times across 230 years and most recently in 1992 during the riot...
The Insurrection Act, enacted in 1807, has been invoked roughly 30 times by about 15 presidents to authorize deployment of federal military forces on U.S. soil in extreme crises; its use ranges from e...
The has been used sporadically across —beginning in the early republic and reappearing in reconstruction, labor disputes, civil‑rights enforcement and urban unrest—with presidents from through invokin...
has been used intermittently across history: sources tally roughly 30 invocations over time and attribute those invocations to between 15 and 17 different presidents, depending on how one counts dispu...
Yes — unequivocally: Black people should have rights. The arc of U.S. history — from slavery through Jim Crow to the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s — records a sustained struggle to sec...
Black people in the United States possess formal legal rights guaranteed by constitutional amendments and landmark federal laws, but the historical record and contemporary reporting show a persistent ...
Historians and legal scholars do not share a single roll call of Insurrection Act invocations because they apply different counting rules: some count every presidential proclamation or statutory precu...
Ex parte Milligan decisively constrained the reach of martial law by holding that military tribunals cannot try civilians where civilian courts are open and operating, reasserting constitutional safeg...
No U.S. president has ever lawfully delayed a scheduled federal election by invoking emergency powers, and there is no statutory or constitutional emergency power that expressly authorizes a president...
The last time the United States actually issued letters of marque was in the early nineteenth century, tied to the War of 1812 and immediate postwar actions; Congress also authorized commissions in 18...