<P> The U.S. Constitution places primary responsibility for the holding of elections in the hands of the individual states . The maintenance of peace, conduct of orderly elections, and prosecution of unlawful actions are all state responsibilities, pursuant of any state's role of exercising police power and maintaining law and order, whether part of a wider federation or a unitary state . During the local, state, and federal elections of 1874 and 1876 in the former Confederate states, all levels of government chose not to exercise their police powers to maintain law and order . Some historians have concluded most Reconstruction governments did not have the power to suppress the violence . </P> <P> When the U.S. Representatives and Senators from the former Confederate states reached Washington, they set as a priority legislation to prohibit any future President or Congress from directing, by military order or federal legislation, the imposition of federal troops in any U.S. state . By the 1878 election, Congress was dominated by the Democratic Party, and they passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878 . </P> <P> In the mid-20th century, the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower used an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, derived from the Enforcement Acts, to send federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, during the 1957 school desegregation crisis . The Arkansas governor had opposed desegregation after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 in the Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional . The Enforcement Acts, among other powers, allow the President to call up military forces when state authorities are either unable or unwilling to suppress violence that is in opposition to the constitutional rights of the people . </P> <P> The original Posse Comitatus Act referred essentially to the United States Army . The United States Air Force, which had been incorporated within the Army inside the U.S. (and the Navy outside) until 1949, was added in 1956 . This law is often relied upon to prevent the Department of Defense from interfering in domestic law enforcement . The United States Coast Guard is not included in the Act even though it is one of the five armed services because it is not a part of the Department of Defense . At the time the Act became law, the modern Coast Guard did not exist . Its predecessor, the United States Revenue Cutter Service, was primarily a customs enforcement agency and part of the United States Department of the Treasury . In 1915, when the Revenue Cutter Service and the United States Lifesaving Service were amalgamated to form the Coast Guard, the service was both explicitly made a military branch and explicitly given federal law enforcement authority . </P>

Posse comitatus act of 1878 18 u.s.c. § 1385