DON'T MISS: Our Publisher Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has a new op-ed in the Washington Post on the administration's new H-1B visa fee policy.

Yes, The President Can Deploy Troops For Law Enforcement

Since there's increased recent debate on this issue, it's time to settle it: yes, the President can deploy troops for law enforcement. The Center for Renewing America have published a very useful brief on this issue. It's nominally about border security, but it applies to law enforcement more broadly. The authors cut through decades of myth-making around the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) and reframe the issue the way practitioners should: as an integration problem between military capacity and civilian law enforcement under existing constitutional and statutory authorities. That frame matters well beyond the Rio Grande. 

Start with the PCA. Too many lawyers (and journalists) treat it as a near-categorical ban on military involvement in law enforcement. The brief’s reading, which is grounded in statutory text, legislative history, and case law, is that the PCA’s central target was US marshals commandeering troops and disrupting the chain of command, not presidential deployment consistent with the Commander-in-Chief and Take Care powers. The statute itself preserves actions “expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress,” which is a very large exception indeed. Early practice (Hayes, Arthur) and later interpretation (including OLC’s post-9/11 analysis) recognized as much, and the PCA has almost never produced successful prosecutions against executive officials—another signal that its ambit is much more narrow than folk law assumes.

From there the brief walks through the Insurrection Act, which supplies explicit statutory authority when “the ordinary course of judicial proceedings” is impracticable or when unlawful combinations deprive citizens of constitutional rights and states cannot, or will not, protect them. Crucially, the gating requirement is a proclamation to disperse, not an elaborate, justiciable checklist that turns the President into a potted plant. In practical terms, that architecture is built for modern, multi-jurisdictional threats: cartel-driven trafficking pipelines, orchestrated mass looting that overwhelms local capacity, critical-infrastructure sabotage, or violent campaigns by organized groups. We don’t need new law to align national capacity with those realities; we need disciplined doctrine for employing the law we have. 

The Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Officials Act is the everyday workhorse. It enables intelligence sharing, access to bases and equipment, training, communications support, reconnaissance, limited transportation, and other forms of “muscle memory” cooperation while keeping direct search and arrest authorities off the table unless “otherwise authorized by law.” If you’re designing playbooks for fentanyl interdiction, counter-UAS over critical sites, or rapid augmentation during urban unrest, this statute is where you build repeatable processes without tripping into PCA territory. The policy point is that we can scale military support for law enforcement nationally—on roads, in ports, in the air, and online—without putting soldiers on a beat. 

Guard authorities fill in the seams. Section 12406 lets the President call National Guard units into federal service to repel invasion, suppress rebellion or, importantly, execute the laws; 32 U.S.C. § 502(f) supports missions at the President or Secretary of Defense’s request while units remain under state command and control. Those tools proved their value in the capital several years ago and translate cleanly to surging manpower for perimeter security, convoy protection of seized contraband, or protection of federal facilities nationwide when local agencies are stretched. The common thread is flexibility with clear command relationships intact. 

Underneath the statutes sits the constitutional floor: the Commander-in-Chief and Take Care Clauses, reinforced by the Guarantee Clause’s promise of protection against invasion and domestic violence. The brief’s historical survey, from Washington’s response to the Whiskey Rebellion, through Lincoln’s wartime measures, to Reconstruction, underscores that presidents have repeatedly used military force domestically to restore civil order. Courts, Congress, and practice have treated this as a duty tied to liberty, not a slippery slope to militarized government.

What does all this mean for law enforcement as a whole? First, retire the PCA “can’t do” reflex. Replace it with a “can do, this way” playbook that sequences MCCLEOA support as the default, Guard authorities as the surge, and Insurrection Act authorities as the exception for true breakdowns in civil order.

Second, pre-negotiate interagency concepts of operation for cartel interdiction and transnational crime that treat criminal networks as “unlawful combinations” for purposes of triggering higher-end authorities if needed.

Third, invest in the enabling layer—secure comms, reconnaissance, data fusion, logistics—that lets civilian agencies remain the visible face while benefiting from military scale.

Republicans should treat this as a governance opportunity. The aim isn’t to put camo on every corner. It’s to use the authorities we already have to stiffen the rule of law where it’s under coordinated assault.

Policy News You Need To Know

#VotingRights — The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today in a case that could significantly reshape election litigation by determining whether candidates have standing to challenge voting procedures in federal court. At issue is an Illinois law permitting officials to count mail-in ballots received up to two weeks after Election Day, which Republican Rep. Michael Bost and two presidential electors argue constitutes an illegal extension of the federal voting timeline. Two lower courts dismissed the lawsuit on standing grounds, finding that Bost's claimed injuries were too speculative and amounted to a "generalized grievance" rather than concrete harm. Bost's legal team contends that candidates suffer both electoral and financial injuries when forced to staff campaigns through protracted ballot-counting windows, while Illinois officials warn that broadening standing requirements would unleash a flood of ideologically-motivated challenges to election rules and divert resources from actual election administration. The Trump administration has filed an amicus brief supporting a narrow rule that would grant candidates standing only when disputed ballots could plausibly affect their race's outcome, though this still represents an expansion of current doctrine. Mail-in voting is obviously unsafe and any challenge to this crazy concept is welcome.

#Obamacare — Conservative leaders across the movement are coalescing around a clear position: the Biden-era Covid credits must expire as scheduled after 2025, not become another permanent entitlement masquerading as temporary relief. Brian Blase of the Paragon Health Institute lays out the case for repeal. Originally sold as pandemic-era emergency measures when Democrats passed them unilaterally without a single Republican vote, these enhanced Obamacare subsidies have outlived their stated purpose by years while fueling both premium inflation and widespread fraud. Paragon's research shows double the expected rate of zero-claim enrollees, a telltale sign of fraudulent enrollment. The fiscal impact alone should give pause to any serious conservative: we're looking at $1 trillion over the next decade for the base subsidies, with extension adding another 45% to that tab. As Chip Roy argued in the Journal, caving on these subsidies would undermine Republicans' credibility on healthcare reform just when we need to demonstrate we're serious about market-based solutions rather than government largesse. The credits create perverse incentives by allowing insurers to collect full premiums from taxpayers while nearly half of enrollees are auto-renewed without taking any action, disconnecting consumers from costs and enabling the very premium increases the subsidies claim to address. With prominent conservatives from Sean Hannity to Ben Shapiro publicly opposing extension, and Democrats threatening government shutdown over what amounts to a $450 billion gift to insurance companies, this is shaping up as a defining test of whether Republicans will hold the line on limiting government's role in healthcare markets.

#Energy #HotAir — As you know, the admin has been trying to use administrative powers to hobble previously-greenlit wind energy projects. This makes sense as wind energy is terribly inefficient, expensive, and environmentally disruptive. As the Institute for Energy Research reports, however, a court ruled that the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut could continue construction while a lawsuit against it proceeds, even though the Trump administration halted construction on the wind project when it was 80% complete for national security reasons. As the good people at IER note, offshore wind is extremely expensive and operates less than half the time that fossil fuel and nuclear technologies operate, and New England states have some of the highest electricity prices in the nation due to their policies of limiting natural gas pipelines, forcing green mandates, joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and retiring coal plants. If Revolution Wind is completed, Connecticut residents will be paying even higher prices for power.

#Reg — The Cato folks are out with an interesting policy brief. The basic idea is this: can't repeal occupational licensing rules? How about repealing occupational licensing boards? The brief argues that these quasi-governmental bodies have become anti-competitive cartels that harm economic opportunity while doing little to protect public safety. Of course, it's Cato, so they would say that. Stephen Slivinski's analysis reveals that 85% of the nation's 1,700+ licensing boards are controlled by industry insiders who use their enforcement powers to box out competitors. The Supreme Court pointed to this problem in the 2015 North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners case, they argue, but states have largely failed to address it. The paper argues that licensing restrictions depress employment by up to 27% in affected occupations, particularly harming low-income workers and those with criminal records trying to re-enter the workforce. While full deregulation remains the ideal free-market solution, Slivinski proposes interim reforms that would strip boards of enforcement powers and transfer those functions to accountable executive agencies, eliminate industry control of board appointments, and ensure proper oversight to prevent the kind of anti-competitive witch hunts that have plagued entrepreneurs.

#DrillBabyDrill — President Trump this week ordered approval of a proposed 211-mile road through an Alaska wilderness to allow mining of copper, cobalt, gold and other minerals.

#Lawfare — Legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich is in the Journal with a really good piece: the International Criminal Court, this joke of a pseudo-court, is already planning to try Donald Trump. That is, unless Trump ends the ICC first.

#Lawfare — Speaking of lawfare, according to a Fox News Digital report, Former Special Counsel Jack Smith was reportedly tracking the private communications and phone calls of nearly a dozen Republican senators as part of his January 6 investigation

#LawAndOrder — Nicholas J. Roske was sentenced to only 8 years for trying to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The purpose of the sentence, presumably, is to encourage further attempts on the lives of Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices.

#ItsHappeningDotGif — National Guard enters Chicago. (BBC)