[GOPcapitalist]

When the rebellion broke out, Congress was out of session, not to return for another eight months and there was no way for the both houses of the new Congress to be called into session until June or so.

Nonsense. The Senate was in session until March 28th and most of the House was still around in Washington at least for the inaugural on March 4th. Lincoln could have EASILY called the House into session and called the Senate to remain in session. But he did neither. Instead he sat around waiting for the senate to go home. Barely a week after they left he started his war making plans by organizing the so-called relief expedition to Fort Sumter.

The Militia Act of 1792 empowered the President to take much the same actions as lifting habeas corpus would have done.

...but not to suspend habeas corpus itself. Try again.

Neo-Confederates make a big deal about today, but patriots at the time did not.

The suspension helped push some of the border states and the indian tribes into the secession column. It drew two federal court rulings against it including one from the chief justice. It recieved heavy condemnation in newspapers around the country. It even provoked retired Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis, a republican and author of the Dred Scott dissent, to condemn Lincoln's actions as unconstitutional. So yes, Partisan. I'd say a great deal was made of it both at the time it happened and today.

[Grand Old Partisan]

You are hardly an expert on how easily the House of Representatives could have gotten itself organized. In those days, it sometimes took weeks just to elect a Speaker before business could be conducted. And then there was the matter of whether rebel Representatives were going to keep their seats, to be obstructionist. People alive then understood the situation.

One of the reasons that patriots did not have a problem with the President's action is that the Founding Fathers' Militia Aact empowered him to do what suspending the privilege would have done -- round up rebels and imprison them.

Again, most patriots did not have a problem with it, though many rebels did, and Curtis was a retired, with no more say-so than Jimmy Carter does today.
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