Nicholas Lemann: The President Should Have Stepped in with Federal Troops to Save Katrina's Victims
[Why didn't President Bush sendfederal troops to Louisiana after the governor refused to turn over control of the state's National Guard?]
... Article I of the United States Constitution gives the federal government the power to “suppress insurrections.” This has always been a touchy subject—especially in the South, and most especially during the Reconstruction period, after the biggest insurrection in American history had been successfully suppressed. The Insurrection Act of 1807 outlines the script that the Administration evidently wanted Governor Blanco to follow: a governor asks the President to federalize local law enforcement in order to suppress an insurrection; the President issues a proclamation ordering the “insurgents to disperse”; they don’t; the cavalry rides to the rescue.
But the President has the option of sending in troops without being asked when the law isn’t being enforced or the rights of a class of people are being denied—which was clearly the case in New Orleans, not just because crime was rampant but because so many people were trapped in hellish conditions. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush, who liked to build alliances before invading, sent federal troops to quell the Los Angeles riots after the governor requested him to. In 1957 and 1963, however, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy sent troops to the South to enforce the civil rights of African-Americans without gubernatorial invitations. It’s no accident that all three invocations of the Insurrection Act had to do with the American dilemma: throughout our history, the moments of greatest contention about federal power have involved race.
The Reconstruction period ended with a protracted and bloody conflict over the question of deploying federal troops in the South. In the Southern states with the largest black populations, organized terrorist groups arose that would do whatever it took, including murder, to insure election victories by the Democratic Party, which was dominated by unrepentant former Confederates. The best means of suppressing the terrorists and insuring free elections was to send in the Army. Congress made the use of troops easier or harder depending on who was in power in Washington. Laws passed in 1870 and 1871, the heyday both of the Ku Klux Klan and of Radical Republicanism, made it easier to use troops in the South; the post-Reconstruction Posse Comitatus Act of 1878—an attempt to eviscerate the Insurrection Act by requiring an act of Congress before federal troops could be used—made it more difficult. The issue of federal intervention and the issue of whether freed slaves and their descendants would fully be citizens were essentially the same. Reconstruction ended with the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877. They were withdrawn, supposedly, to restore normal governance in the former Confederate states, but the consequence was that those states, once there was nobody on hand to force them to obey the Constitution, took full citizenship away from African-Americans.
No state saw more conflict over federal power than Louisiana. A massacre of politically active blacks in New Orleans in the summer of 1866 helped set in motion the passage of constitutional amendments that made it illegal to deny civil rights and the right to vote to anyone on the basis of race. President Grant sent federal troops to the Red River Valley after notorious massacres there in 1873 and 1874; in 1874, federal troops were ordered to New Orleans after a Democratic white militia tried to overthrow the Republican state government; in 1875, federal troops marched onto the floor of the state legislature to restore the Republicans to power after another coup d’état by the Democrats. This last intervention was a pivotal event—not because it enforced order once and for all but because it horrified the nation, which in those days was not at all sure that it was in favor of Negro rights. Before long, federal intervention in the South in the name of civil rights became a taboo so absolute that no President violated it for more than three-quarters of a century.
This is not ancient history. The New Orleans ghettos that America got an oblique look at after the hurricane grew up during the time when the South, having successfully resisted the federal government, imposed a secondary status on blacks. ...
Read entire article at New Yorker
... Article I of the United States Constitution gives the federal government the power to “suppress insurrections.” This has always been a touchy subject—especially in the South, and most especially during the Reconstruction period, after the biggest insurrection in American history had been successfully suppressed. The Insurrection Act of 1807 outlines the script that the Administration evidently wanted Governor Blanco to follow: a governor asks the President to federalize local law enforcement in order to suppress an insurrection; the President issues a proclamation ordering the “insurgents to disperse”; they don’t; the cavalry rides to the rescue.
But the President has the option of sending in troops without being asked when the law isn’t being enforced or the rights of a class of people are being denied—which was clearly the case in New Orleans, not just because crime was rampant but because so many people were trapped in hellish conditions. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush, who liked to build alliances before invading, sent federal troops to quell the Los Angeles riots after the governor requested him to. In 1957 and 1963, however, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy sent troops to the South to enforce the civil rights of African-Americans without gubernatorial invitations. It’s no accident that all three invocations of the Insurrection Act had to do with the American dilemma: throughout our history, the moments of greatest contention about federal power have involved race.
The Reconstruction period ended with a protracted and bloody conflict over the question of deploying federal troops in the South. In the Southern states with the largest black populations, organized terrorist groups arose that would do whatever it took, including murder, to insure election victories by the Democratic Party, which was dominated by unrepentant former Confederates. The best means of suppressing the terrorists and insuring free elections was to send in the Army. Congress made the use of troops easier or harder depending on who was in power in Washington. Laws passed in 1870 and 1871, the heyday both of the Ku Klux Klan and of Radical Republicanism, made it easier to use troops in the South; the post-Reconstruction Posse Comitatus Act of 1878—an attempt to eviscerate the Insurrection Act by requiring an act of Congress before federal troops could be used—made it more difficult. The issue of federal intervention and the issue of whether freed slaves and their descendants would fully be citizens were essentially the same. Reconstruction ended with the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877. They were withdrawn, supposedly, to restore normal governance in the former Confederate states, but the consequence was that those states, once there was nobody on hand to force them to obey the Constitution, took full citizenship away from African-Americans.
No state saw more conflict over federal power than Louisiana. A massacre of politically active blacks in New Orleans in the summer of 1866 helped set in motion the passage of constitutional amendments that made it illegal to deny civil rights and the right to vote to anyone on the basis of race. President Grant sent federal troops to the Red River Valley after notorious massacres there in 1873 and 1874; in 1874, federal troops were ordered to New Orleans after a Democratic white militia tried to overthrow the Republican state government; in 1875, federal troops marched onto the floor of the state legislature to restore the Republicans to power after another coup d’état by the Democrats. This last intervention was a pivotal event—not because it enforced order once and for all but because it horrified the nation, which in those days was not at all sure that it was in favor of Negro rights. Before long, federal intervention in the South in the name of civil rights became a taboo so absolute that no President violated it for more than three-quarters of a century.
This is not ancient history. The New Orleans ghettos that America got an oblique look at after the hurricane grew up during the time when the South, having successfully resisted the federal government, imposed a secondary status on blacks. ...
Is it too much to hope for that the disaster might reëstablish in the national mind the link between race and governance? The shock that non-New Orleanians experienced at what they saw was genuine, but memories have faded to the point that people no longer make what was once an obvious connection between a disabled federal government and bad outcomes for African-Americans. Seeing the two together after Katrina ought to make us understand how literally deadly are the effects of a reluctance to use government. Perhaps even the Bush Administration will reconsider.