Elizabeth Jo
speaker
2,299 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 27 Mar
Elizabeth Jo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Wow.
But with the Posse Comatatis Act, I'm actually thinking of our earlier conversation with Nicole Hannah Jones, because the act itself has a history that's intertwined with the Civil War and racism actually.
Um, during Reconstruction, federal troops occupied the former Confederacy, and that included black soldiers who were part of those federal troops.
And they were all there to ensure that the federal laws would be respected, especially when it came to protecting voting rights.
And Southerners saw these troops as a humiliation.
So I'm condensing a lot of civil war history here, but in order to settle the hotly contested eighteen seventy six presidential election, which Rutherford Hayes barely won.
Hayes ended up agreeing to remove federal troops from the South.
Exactly.
It ends Reconstruction and the promise of securing rights for black Americans in the South after the Civil War.
But of course if you read the act, you'd never know that.
So you have this act with less than savory origins, but nevertheless a federal law that does uphold an important principle in our legal system.
And apart from some minor changes like the inclusion of the space force.
Uh it has remained mostly unchanged since it was originally passed.
So the act expresses this general idea, this presumption, that we should not have a standing army in the United States.
But the problem is that the law permits exceptions.
You can't have a posse comitatis unless expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.
Now the authorized by the Constitution part doesn't mean much because there's not actually nothing in the Constitution that specifically allows us to do this.
On the other hand, Congress has passed laws that create exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act.
In other words, Congress may sometimes say, Here are situations where the president can use the military in a civilian context.
That's a good question because we don't know.
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