| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Politix |
| Governors lose in power struggle over National Guard |
| 2007-01-16 |
| A little-noticed change in federal law packs an important change in who is in charge the next time a state is devastated by a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina. To the dismay of the nationÂ’s governors, the White House now will be empowered to go over a governorÂ’s head and call up National Guard troops to aid a state in time of natural disasters or other public emergencies. Up to now, governors were the sole commanders in chief of citizen soldiers in local Guard units during emergencies within the state. A conflict over who should control Guard units arose in the days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. President Bush sought to federalize control of Guardsmen in Louisiana in the chaos after the hurricane, but Gov. Kathleen Blanco (D) refused to relinquish command. Over objections from all 50 governors, Congress in October tweaked the 200-year-old Insurrection Act to empower the hand of the president in future stateside emergencies. In a letter to Congress, the governors called the change "a dramatic expansion of federal authority during natural disasters that could cause confusion in the command-and-control of the National Guard and interfere with states' ability to respond to natural disasters within their borders." The change adds to tensions between governors and the White House after more than four years of heavy federal deployment of state-based Guard forces to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, four out of five guardsmen have been sent overseas in the largest deployment of the National Guard since World War II. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #16 Also, {http://www.mil.state.or.us/SDF/index.html} gives a good explanation of a SDF that is presently in operation in Oregon. |
| Posted by: Shieldwolf 2007-01-16 21:43 |
| #15 Please refer to {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Defense_Forces} for a good explanation of the differences in the militias, including the specific State Defense Forces which are excluded from federalization. |
| Posted by: Shieldwolf 2007-01-16 21:39 |
| #14 I find this to be a very interesting topic. Does the Militia Act of 1903 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Act_of_1903) allow the feds to federalize all militias? I'm a little confused on the statutory requirements of what state militias can and can't be federalized. |
| Posted by: OIF3 Guy 2007-01-16 17:21 |
| #13 "if the governor wanted an armed militia on the border with Mexico" Not sure the states have jurisdiction over international border crossings - if the Feds say the border is open and all immigrants are legal, I don't think the states can do anything about it. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2007-01-16 17:00 |
| #12 Since 1865, the former state militia have been subsumed into the National Guard. However, the federal Militia Act makes it clear that the states CAN have a local militia that has the governor as the head of it, as do some Supreme Court decisions. The major problem for the states on that is that they would have to buy, pay for, and maintain ALL weapons, munitions, equipment, and wages used/consumed/utilized by those militias from state monies in order to retain control. Otherwise, the feds would be able to demand operational control once they decided they needed it, if they were to provide a significant portion of the said funding. That is because of the federal experience with the state militias that became the Confederate Army during the Civil War : those militias were in the main equipped with retired equipment from the national army. |
| Posted by: Shieldwolf 2007-01-16 16:03 |
| #11 I agree completely that States should have their own independent militias. First of all, they would be under the complete and total control of the States for whatever missions that State needed, to include their organization and equipment. Second, they might include a "peacetime exclusion" that would prohibit militia members from being active duty or reserve military personnel, so that they could not be recalled from State duty for federal purposes, perhaps in the same disaster. Third, they would be free from any legal restrictions placed on US military personnel, could be deputized as a State police reserve with the authority of arrest, and could not be prohibited from conducting any law enforcement activity. That is, if the governor wanted an armed militia on the border with Mexico, the President himself could not direct them to stand down and let illegal aliens through. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-01-16 14:53 |
| #10 If a State wants a military organization with the State as sole controller then the National Guard is NOT the organization to chose. All equipment is owned by the Federal Government. Let the States form and fund their own Militias, which is provided for in the Constitution. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2007-01-16 12:12 |
| #9 ...What strikes me here is that not a SINGLE member of the MSM ought to be doing anything other than applauding this (and for the record, I'm VERY much against the new rules - anything that takes that kind of power out of the hands of the States and gives it to the President without a Constitutional amendment and all the debate that goes with it is a Very Bad Thing)and saying it's long overdue. We all saw in here how consistently and often unfairly the MSM blamed the White House for NOT doing more. They'd now better sit down and shut up, because they got exactly what they wanted. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2007-01-16 11:29 |
| #8 In addition, along with the inherent oppression of bureaucratic centralization, the ruling class becomes alienated from the citizenry and ruthlessly arrogant. Look at the hubris and physical and moral cowardice of your French political class (wrongly carried over by some posters here to the French as a whole) for the best example of this. Whatever DeGaulle's other faults, he strode through the French political scene like a giant through pygmies precisely because he wasn't a feckless weasel. |
| Posted by: E. Brown 2007-01-16 10:29 |
| #7 It was best summed up by the book title, "Freeing the Slaves, Enslaving Free Men." |
| Posted by: E. Brown 2007-01-16 10:18 |
| #6 "And Human Rights began." Mmmm, no it didn't, JFM. You, of all the people that post here, ought to know what unrestrained bureaucratic centralization of government does to the classical liberal Enlightenment notion of freedom. The hypocrisy of classical liberals like Jefferson, et. al., in applying their notions of freedom to all does not invalidate those freedoms, contra the leftists of both our countries. |
| Posted by: E. Brown 2007-01-16 10:16 |
| #5 All made possible by the 'fear mongering' MSM and cheap Donk operatives who used a disaster of Biblical proportions to hammer the sitting President. If you going to stick the office with responsibilities it never had then be prepared for power to shift to that office. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2007-01-16 09:38 |
| #4 No. Human Rights began in 1215 at the latest. They've been expanding ever since. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2007-01-16 07:52 |
| #3 For all practical purposes States Rights ended in 1865. And Human Rights began. |
| Posted by: JFM 2007-01-16 07:43 |
| #2 For all practical purposes States Rights ended in 1865. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2007-01-16 07:09 |
| #1 There are indications that Gov. Blanco was kept well informed by the LANG operations center at the Superdome: Governor Kathleen Blanco, meanwhile, had a direct pipeline to the command center and clearly knew what was going on, which might explain why she maintained her authority over the Guard and resisted calls from the President to federalize it. It also explains her apparent callousness to those stuck in the Dome - she knew the real situation was not as bad as the media was reporting. At the very least, she deserves credit for standing up to the national media and following the advice of the junior officers on the scene. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2007-01-16 00:35 |