Word: governors
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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These constitutional provisions allow a state governor a wide range of discretion, first, in deciding that the emergency exists which justifies martial law, and second in choosing the means to enforce order...
...there are limits. This wide discretion of a governor to meet crises cannot be made the excuse for the subjection of American citizens to military rule, when there is no emergency. For example, there are probably more gangsters per thousand people in Chicago than in Narragansett Park, but the governor of Illinois can not properly put Chicago under martial law tomorrow. Martial law would otherwise be an easy route to dictatorship...
Chief Justice Hughes goes on to say "It does not follow from the fact that the Executive has this range of discretion, deemed to be a necessary incident of his power to suppress disorder, that every sort of action the Governor may take, no matter how unjustified by the exigency or subversive of private right and the jurisdiction of the courts otherwise available, is conclusively supported by mere executive flat...
...know, there is no precedent for the power of a governor to establish martial law in times of peace when there has been no rioting, no great disaster like a fire, flood, or earthquake, and no acts of violence except a few of the kind that are ordinarily handled without difficulty by prosecutions for assault and battery...
Indeed, the United States Supreme Court, in the case where Chief Justice Hughes was quoted above, unanimously denied the power of the Governor of Texas to establish martial law in an oil field for the purpose of carrying out a conservation policy entrusted by the Texas legislature to an administrative body resembling the Rhode Island Racing Commission, when the governor thought that the orders of the Texas commission were not sufficiently vigorous and also feared that those orders would be upset by the courts...