The White House is talking about invoking the Insurrection Act that would allow the deployment of military troops on US soil to quell domestic unrest amid legal challenges over the moves, JD Vance confirmed on Sunday.
Vance was asked on NBC News’s Meet the Press whether Donald Trump was seriously considering invoking the emergency power to deploy national guard forces and even the US military in domestic settings.
“The president’s looking at all of his options,” he said, adding that “we are talking about this because crime has gotten out of control in our cities”.
Trump’s attempts to use federal national guard forces in Democratic-run cities has faced challenges in the courts, most notably in Chicago in recent days.
The vice-president’s ominous remarks came days after Trump referred to the Insurrection Act from the Oval Office, bluntly stating: “If I had to enact it, I would do that.” Military forces are forbidden from engaging in law enforcement duties on home soil.
But under the Insurrection Act, which was signed in 1807, the president can deploy them domestically in cases of insurrection or rebellion, violence that is preventing the functioning of federal laws.
The power was used during the 1960s civil rights movement during clashes over desegregation of the south but since then has been very rarely activated. The last time a president called on it was in 1992 when the governor of California requested military aid from George HW Bush in response to civil unrest in Los Angeles.
In Sunday’s Meet the Press interview, Vance said Trump “hasn’t felt he needed to” invoke the Insurrection Act up to this point. But he confirmed that it was among the tactics being considered as the administration continues to be stymied in federal courts from deploying federalised national guard forces in Democratic-run cities.
Federal courts have blocked the White House from using troops in Oregon and Illinois. On Thursday a federal judge prohibited the deployment of federalised national guard personnel in Chicago, admonishing the administration that she had “seen no credible evidence that there is a danger of a rebellion in the state of Illinois”.
National guard troops have been sent into Illinois by the Trump administration from both Texas and California but under the temporary court order cannot be put out into the streets.
Vance told NBC News that options such as the Insurrection Act were being considered because “there are places in Chicago where people are afraid to take their children … for fear of gun violence, for fear of gang drive-by shootings”.
In a separate interview with This Week on ABC News, Vance said that Chicago had been given over to “lawlessness and gangs” and had a murder rate “that rivals the worst places in the third world”.
In fact, violent crime has been falling at unprecedented rates in America’s biggest cities including Chicago over the past two years. Chicago is not in the top four large US cities with the highest murder rates – all of whom are in states controlled by Republicans.
As Vance did the rounds of Sunday’s political talkshows, tension between the Trump administration and the Democratic states it is targeting exploded across TV screens. The vice-president was repeatedly asked by George Stephanopoulos on ABC News whether the Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, had committed a crime that could see him being prosecuted by the Department of Justice as have several other of Trump’s “political enemies”.
Vance skirted the question until he was pressed into saying: “He should suffer consequences. Whether he has violated a crime I would leave to the courts, but he has certainly violated his oath of office and that seems pretty criminal to me.”
Pritzker responded to the veiled threat by accusing Vance of coming out with a “tidal wave of lies”. The governor told This Week that he was not intimidated by the prospect of prosecution as has befallen the former FBI director James Comey and the New York attorney general Letitia James, who have both been indicted in recent days.
Pritzker said: “I am not afraid. Do I think he could do it? He might. But as I have said before, come and get me. I mean, you’re dead wrong, Mr President and Mr Vice-President, and I will stand up for the law and the constitution.”
Raw emotions were widely on display across the TV studios as the federal government shutdown entered day 12. The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, told Fox News Sunday that the crisis had been orchestrated by Democratic leaders in Congress as a partisan move “so that they can prove to their Marxist base that they are willing to fight Trump”.
He said that after eight attempts to reopen the government had all failed in votes in the Senate, the shutdown was causing “real pain for real people – and the Democrats don’t seem to care”.
On the same program, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, denied that the Democratic stance was partisan. “We will sit down with anyone, any time, any place, go back to the White House, to have a bipartisan discussion about reopening the government,” he said.
The Democrats’ aim, Jeffries added, was to “improve the quality of life of the American people and address the healthcare crisis that threatens tens of millions of people across the country”.
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