President Trump is leaving the White House to go to St. John's Church after the area was cleared of people protesting the death of George Floyd.
President Trump threatened Monday to take military action in U.S. cities if violent protests in recent days are not suppressed.

 "If a city or state refuses to take the necessary steps to defend the lives and property of its people, then I will deploy the U.S. military and quickly solve the problem for them," Trump said in a brief statement in the White House Rose Garden.
To do so, the president will have to invoke what is known as the Insurrection Act of 1807. The original text of the act, which has been amended several times since its passage, reads:
An Act authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States, in cases of insurrections

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the pre-requisites of the law in that respect.
APPROVED, March 3, 1807.

President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House, Monday, June 1, 2020, in Washington.


 The law was last invoked in 1992 to quell the Los Angeles riots after four white police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, a black man, and before that in 1989 during widespread looting in St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands, after Hurricane Hugo.
Before invoking it, the President must first issue a proclamation ordering the insurgents to disperse within a limited time frame, 10 U.S.C. - 334.4. If the situation does not resolve itself, the president can issue an executive order to send troops, according to a 2006 report by the Congressional Research Service.

 It was the same year that the law was amended to expand the cases in which the president can invoke the law, after the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina a year earlier was criticized.

 It authorizes "the President to use the armed forces in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack."

 As to whether a state should request the presence of these military forces in the state, this is "not necessarily" the case, according to experts.

A section of the law (§251) says (emphasis ours):

 "[T]he President may, upon the request of its legislature or of its governor if the legislature cannot be convened, call into Federal service such of the militia."
But the next section (§252) says:

 "Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion."