Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor: 12th & 13th of April, 1861. Image: Library of Congress
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What will happen if a soldier from the Texas National Guard fires his gun at a soldier from the Illinois National Guard? This is a question that has not arisen since 1860, when soldiers from South Carolina fired on Union troops stationed at Ft. Sumter.
Forest fires and tornados and hurricanes are the common enemies of all Americans. We have a long and honorable tradition in this country of states coming to the aid of other states when they are in crisis. We have seen it when firefighters show up to help fight forest fires, sometimes in states a thousand miles away from their own. We saw it recently when other states sent their water rescue and recovery teams to Kerrville, Texas, to help with the extreme flooding that hit the Hill Country north of San Antonio and Austin. Electric companies from as far away as New England have sent repair vehicles and linemen to help states like Florida and North Carolina recover from damage when they are hit with hurricanes that bring down power grids to entire regions. Sometimes the National Guards of nearby states are deployed when their neighbors need help. This happened with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and it has happened during other natural disasters elsewhere. Even water rescue teams from Mexico joined in the rescue and recovery of victims in the Texas floods.
There is no common enemy that justifies Donald Trump’s federalization and deployment of the Texas National Guard to Chicago or Portland. The governors of both states have notified the Trump administration that they have the necessary law enforcement resources to handle whatever problems they have had with crime or recent demonstrations against ICE agents rounding up undocumented migrants.
The deployment of one state’s militia to another state over the objections of that state’s governor is unprecedented in our history. The only thing that even comes close was when at different times Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson federalized the National Guards of Arkansas and Alabama when their governors refused to allow the integration of schools in their states. In both cases, the National Guard units that were put under federal control came from the states in which they were used.
What Donald Trump is doing in Chicago and what he wants to do in Portland is to use the military to achieve his political goals. Again, this has never happened before. The National Guards of Alabama and Arkansas were activated federally for a constitutional purpose, to uphold the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the decisions of lower federal courts that had ordered schools to be integrated.
Trump’s attempt to send National Guard troops from California to Oregon was stopped by a federal court, and if he now sends National Guard units from Texas, as he has threatened to do, he will be in violation and defiance of a federal court order.
To say that Trump is playing politics with our military is a gigantic understatement. He is attempting to use the United States military to intimidate state and local politicians and provoke the citizens of two cities controlled by Democratic Party mayors and governors into committing violent acts to repel what they will likely see as a military invasion of their neighborhoods. He wants confrontation with protestors. He has talked recently about invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can get around the strictures of the Posse Comitatus Act that bars the use of the military for civil law enforcement purposes.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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