On an unseasonably chilly but sunny day, March 20, 1965, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson stood on the porch of his Texas ranch and read a telegram he had just sent to Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
“I am calling into federal service selected units of the Alabama National Guard… to help you meet your state responsibilities,” Johnson said.
For more than a week, Johnson and Wallace had been going back and forth about the president’s concerns for the safety of Black Alabamians trying to exercise their right to vote and peacefully protest police brutality.
Wallace, a segregationist, refused to call in his state’s National Guard to protect the Black protesters — who had planned a march from Selma to Montgomery — so Johnson did it in his place.
To do so, Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act, an 18th century law that allows the president to deploy military forces inside the U.S.
It’s what many legal scholars and democracy watchers believed U.S. President Donald Trump might one day use to clamp down on dissent against his administration’s policies.
For the first time since Johnson, Trump on Saturday overrode a state’s authority and called up its National Guard to quell protests in Los Angeles over recent raids by federal immigration authorities. He sent 2,000 members of the California National Guard into the city on Saturday.
But Trump used a more obscure law, Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which allows the president to federalize National Guard units in case of an invasion, rebellion, or when police are unable to enforce the country’s laws.
“It was a bit of a surprise attack,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University who specializes in new autocracies.
“I think it was something for which Trump’s opposition was less well prepared legally.”
Another law, 1878’s Posse Comitatus Act, generally forbids the U.S. military, including the National Guard, from taking part in civilian law enforcement.
Title 10 does not override that prohibition, but allows the troops to protect federal agents who are carrying out law enforcement activity and to protect federal property.
For example, National Guard troops cannot arrest protesters, but they could protect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who are carrying out arrests.
‘Unmistakable step toward authoritarianism’
What has worried legal scholars in Scheppele’s circles even more, though, is that Trump’s proclamation deploying the National Guard made no mention of California or a specific time period.
“There’s nothing to prevent him from calling out the National Guard … anywhere else that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] has been active or where public protests have arisen against it.”
Newsom sued the Trump administration on Monday, calling Trump’s move “an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism.”
The biggest difference “between now and 1965 is the degree to which this is basically a manufactured conflict,” said Barry Eidlin, an assistant professor of sociology at McGill University, who researches social change in the U.S. and Canada.
Sixty years ago, Johnson wanted National Guard troops to “quell a reactionary segregationist counterinsurgency against dissolving federal policy in favour of civil rights for all,” he said, newly returned to Montreal from L.A., where his family lives and where he splits his time.
“Whereas the current administration is basically trying to rollback civil rights for all.”
John Carey, a professor of government at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and the co-founder of Bright Line Watch, a group monitoring threats to American democracy, also says Trump is trying to provoke violence.
“I think what’s actually going on is the president and his administration are trying to bait California state officials and the protesters,” he said, adding that immigration is one of the issues on which Trump has the broadest support.
“I worry tremendously about the implications of this for American democracy.”
The idea, Carey and Eidlin say, is that National Guard troops’ presence could escalate violence — which already appears to be the case — further justifying federal intervention.
Eidlin said Trump wants to create “a rationale for further Draconian crackdowns.”
The day after Johnson deployed Alabama’s National Guard, more than 3,000 marchers began their 87-kilometre walk from Selma to Montgomery along Route 80. They walked for four days without interference from white supremacists, law enforcement or vigilantes.
By the time they arrived, the march had swelled to around 25,000 people. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “How long, not long” speech on the steps of the State Capitol, calling for racial justice.
Later that year, the Voting Rights Act was passed, outlawing voter suppression practices, such as literacy tests and poll taxes.
