The most hardline conservative bloc of House Republicans is calling on President Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota if he deems it necessary, days after federal agents in Minneapolis shot and killed a second U.S. citizen in a matter of weeks — and just hours after the president, referring to protesters, declared, “you can’t have guns.”

In an unsigned letter to Trump, the House Freedom Caucus said it was encouraging the president to use “all tools necessary — including the Insurrection Act,” to “maintain order in the face of unlawful obstructions and assemblages that prevent the enforcement of laws by the United States.”

The Minneapolis protests have been largely peaceful.

The Freedom Caucus also urged the president to maintain “necessary law enforcement including ICE in Minneapolis.” Some have suggested that Trump may have been looking for an off-ramp, or a means to wind down “Operation Metro Surge.”

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The group also called on Trump to end funding for sanctuary cities, and to ensure that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is “funded fully along with all remaining appropriation bills.”

Democrats in the Senate are demanding that the DHS funding bill be separated from other legislative funding vehicles, which would require unlikely House approval.

The Freedom Caucus, led by hard-core conservative Republican Andy Harris, threatened to take extreme action should Democrats, they said, shut down the federal government. A partial government shutdown is possible after Friday.

On Monday, far-right political commentator and strategist Steve Bannon, along with Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren, called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

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Former Trump Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor said that despite his many years at DHS, President Donald Trump has corrupted the organization and is calling for it to be detonated, reconfigured, reimagined, and remade — or else Americans will have to face a police state.

“The Department of Homeland Security has been weaponized against the people, the damage has been done, and it’s time to go back to the drawing board,” Taylor wrote at Defiance News, his home on Substack.

He said he believed that DHS “was the future of our defense against foreign threats and terrorists,” but now, “it’s being used to terrorize Americans.”

Taylor noted that even during Trump’s first term, the president was “magnetically attracted” to DHS’s power and wanted to use it “against the people, not to protect them.”

“DHS had two things he really liked — badges and guns — and it had lots of them,” Taylor wrote. “Indeed, it is America’s largest federal law-enforcement agency, and Donald Trump soon saw those gun-toting agents as his agents, not just the nation’s. They were a means to an end. As Trump told us face-to-face on several occasions, if there’s one thing he learned in business, it’s that you need leverage over people to get what you want from them.”

“Nothing gives you leverage like a gun.”

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Now that Trump is back in office, “we are watching the darkest nightmares of a weaponized DHS come to fruition, as the Department is transformed end-to-end into Donald Trump’s ‘pocket police.'”

Taylor lamented how “DHS social-media accounts mused on New Year’s Eve about mass deportations in the breezy iconography of a vacation advertisement. Then DHS agents were dispatched for their largest deployments in history to Minnesota, under the thin veneer of investigating alleged accounting discrepancies at Somali-American kindergartens.”

And he pointed to the “breathtaking and aggressive crackdown, in which two innocent U.S. citizens were killed at the hands of DHS agents and branded ‘domestic terrorists’ before facts were established, before investigations had even begun, and before the public could get its hands on contrary evidence.”

Taylor warned that “when the president himself tells agents to use ‘whatever means necessary’ against protesters — or the Vice President says officers have ‘absolute immunity’ after killing civilians — ordinary people everywhere rightfully worry that they’re under siege.”

He wrote that “what’s happened in Minnesota is by design. It’s the deliberate implementation of top-down presidential guidance. And it’s working. Officials are turning DHS into a juggernaut for ridding America of so-called ‘domestic terrorists,’ whose crimes appear to be that they hold viewpoints contrary to the president.”

“But it doesn’t stop there,” he observed.

Taylor said that DHS “must be taken apart and put back together with the clear goal of making it harder — much, much harder — to weaponize.”

Here is how.

“First, split immigration off from the DHS mothership,” Taylor wrote, then, “give more DHS agency heads an apolitical tenure,” “supercharge the Inspector General,” and finally, “revoke the president’s domestic terrorism order.”

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The Republican exodus from the U.S. House of Representatives is continuing, with longtime Congressman Vern Buchanan of Florida announcing he will be retiring. Twenty-nine House Republicans have now exited or announced their intention to leave their positions this term already. Buchanan, who serves as the Vice Chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was first elected in 2006.

Some of the other prominent Republicans leaving the House include U.S. Reps. Chip Roy (TX), Andy Biggs (AZ), Byron Donalds (FL), Nancy Mace (SC), and Elise Stefanik (NY).

On Monday, Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman reported: “Today, we only see 18 out of 435 races as toss-ups, but Republicans would need to win two-thirds of the toss-up column to hold their House majority.”

He suggested that Democrats are “modest favorites” to regain the House majority.

Speaker Mike Johnson’s margin over House Democrats is so thin that he directed Republican lawmakers to “take vitamins” earlier this month.

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Last month, political pundits and anonymous Republican lawmakers began predicting that a large GOP exodus from the House of Representatives would come after the winter break, when lawmakers had time to spend with their families to make decisions.

Reporting that “frustrated G.O.P. members are running for the exits before things get worse,” Puck News in December suggested that up to 20 House Republicans could be announcing their retirements soon.

Opposition researcher Tyson Brody, responding to the Buchanan announcement, predicted that more GOP resignations were coming: “the ‘i’m too old to go back into the minority’ retirements are only going to pick up from here.”

Aaron Fritschner, Deputy Chief of Staff for U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), offered more insight.

Noting that Buchanan could ultimately have been chairman of the Ways and Means Committee had he stayed longer, Fritschner added that in his opinion, this “looks like a true ‘we are screwed’ retirement ala 2018,” when Democrats flipped over 40 House Republican seats in a “blue wave.”

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