Elizabeth Goitein

They're not trained to do civilian law enforcement.

And my concern is that in

a face-off or a tense confrontation, they might fall back on their combat training.

And that is something that we have seen in the past when soldiers have been deployed in a domestic context.

Well, martial law is different than deploying troops under the Insurrection Act, at least as it's commonly understood.

I mean, there's no single official definition of martial law, but it's generally understood to refer to a situation where the military actually supplants troops.

and displaces civilian government rather than a situation where troops are deployed to assist civilian law enforcement.

And the Brennan Center did a major study of martial law a few years ago, and we concluded that it would be illegal, that there is no provision in the Constitution or in current legislation that would authorize martial law.

And so the president would have no authority to do it because all of the president's powers derive either from the Constitution or from

statutes passed by Congress.

Now, that doesn't mean he wouldn't try it.

But I do think it's different from the Insurrection Act or the laws that President Trump has relied on in his previous deployments in the sense that there is no congressional authorization for this.

And because it's also not in the Constitution, it's really something that the president could not do.

Yeah, well, the Supreme Court stopped him from using the law that he was relying on to federalize the National Guard in Illinois.

But they held that the law couldn't be used for that purpose.

And so President Trump saw the writing on the wall and he demobilized the troops in those other cities.

I mean, the Supreme Court didn't allow federalization in those cities.

The Supreme Court just didn't hear those cases.

But because the Supreme Court said he could not rely on the law that he was using, at least in the way that he was using it, I'll put it that way, that decision basically failed.

applied to the other cities as well.