See Here, General Kennedy

When the N.A.A.C.P. urged President Johnson to consider "taking over" race-torn Mississippi, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy replied that the federal-state relationship forbids "preventive police action." Last week General Kennedy (Virginia Law, '51) was given a failing grade on his answer by 29 law professors at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, N.Y.U., Pennsylvania and Boston College. Whatever Kennedy's political motives, said they in an open letter rebutting his "facile pronouncement," the legal facts are clear. The Federal Government has been fully empowered since Reconstruction to "take protective action in the circumstances that now prevail in Mississippi." >Section 332 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code authorizes the President to use state militia and federal troops "whenever he considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages, or rebellions against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any state or territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." It was under that statute that Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy took military action at Little Rock in 1957 and the University of Mississippi in 1962. -- Section 333 of Title 10 further empowers the President to use "any other means"--not only troops, but also federal marshals--"to suppress, in a state, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy" whenever such an event denies equal protection to any class of citizens, or "obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws." Obviously pertinent: Mississippi's denial of Negro voting rights guaranteed by the civil rights acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964.

Some may argue that the Constitution leaves the preservation of peace and good order exclusively to the states, said the law professors. But the argument has been without merit since 1879, when the Supreme Court affirmed the Federal Government's power to command obedience to its laws "on every foot of American soil." Prudence may curb this power in Mississippi, noted Kennedy's critics. But it is "disappointing and ironic that the Department of Justice, which has been bold beyond precedent in successfully urging the Supreme Court that the judiciary possesses the broadest powers to enforce the constitutional assurances of equality, should now discover nonexistent barriers to executive action."

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