Tea at Trianon: Minnesota Is Rejecting Federal Sovereignty, The Insurrection Act Exists for This Moment

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, January 18, 2026

Minnesota Is Rejecting Federal Sovereignty, The Insurrection Act Exists for This Moment

From Alexander Muse at Amuse on X:

The Insurrection Act is an old statute with a modern purpose. It is a legal bridge between two truths that sit uneasily together. One truth is that the US is a union of states with real sovereignty in matters of policing and public order. The other truth is that the US is one nation with one set of federal laws, one Constitution, and one federal government charged with executing its laws everywhere. When those truths collide, a republic needs a rule for who must yield, and under what conditions. The Insurrection Act supplies that rule.
To see why, start with the early Republic. The Constitution authorizes Congress to call forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions. It also makes the President Commander in Chief once those forces are in federal service. Congress implemented this constitutional design through the Militia Acts of 1792 and 1795. Those statutes gave the President the power to summon state militias to confront insurrections and invasions, but they did so with caution and with checks. One of those checks was the requirement, in some situations, of a judicial certification that ordinary law enforcement was overwhelmed. Even at the founding, Americans understood the tradeoff. A government that cannot enforce its laws will not stay a government for long. A government that casually deploys soldiers against its citizens risks becoming something else.
George Washington’s response to the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 put that tradeoff into practice. The federal government acted. It did so through legal channels, and it did so to enforce federal law. The core idea was not punishment. It was the preservation of a basic fact about political order, that laws will be executed even when a region decides it would rather not.
By 1807, Thomas Jefferson faced problems that the militia framework did not fully cover. The Republic confronted frontier instability, cross border threats, and a particularly ominous episode, the Burr conspiracy, a suspected plot that combined private armed ambition with the prospect of rebellion in the west. Jefferson concluded that the government might need to respond quickly, and that relying only on state militias might be too slow, too uneven, or too dependent on local will. He therefore sought statutory authorization to use regular federal forces at home. Congress responded with the law signed March 3, 1807, an act authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States in cases of insurrections. (Read more.)