Guarantee clause and the Supreme Court.

As a basis of national power, the guarantee clause has seldom been invoked. President Abraham Lincoln relied on it for authority to suppress the rebellion of the Southern states, and Congress, with the subsequent support of the Supreme Court (, 1869), used it to justify the post-Civil War Reconstruction laws. Its principal significance in constitutional law has been in the Court’s nonjusticiability jurisprudence. In a trespass action arising out of Dorr’s Rebellion (1842), the Court faced the vexing problem of determining which of the warring factions was the legitimate government of Rhode Island when the alleged trespass occurred. Instead of deciding, the Court, in (1849), said that the guarantee clause left to Congress alone the task of deciding “what government is the established one in a State.” became, for more than a century, the leading case and the guarantee clause the primary example for the principle that certain issues were nonjusticiable because they posed political questions properly left to the political branches. Similarly, the court rejected challenges to Oregon’s initiative and referendum procedures in (1912) and Kentucky’s election procedures in (1900).