According to internal Department of Defense documents allegedly obtained by the Washington Post, the current DoD administration is mulling a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of 600 National Guard troops, ready 24/7 to be deployed to quell civil unrest in American cities.
(A grain of salt taken with the following report is in order, given the source, but it has not been refuted by the administration; the DoD refused to comment.)
Via The Washington Post (emphasis added):
The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.
Cost projections outlined in the documents indicate that such a mission, if the proposal is adopted, could stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars should military aircraft and aircrews also be required to be ready around-the-clock. Troop transport via commercial airlines would be less expensive, the documents say…
The documents, marked “predecisional,” are comprehensive and contain extensive discussion about the potential societal implications of establishing such a program. They were compiled by National Guard officials and bear time stamps as recent as late July and early August. Fiscal 2027 is the earliest this program could be created and funded through the Pentagon’s traditional budgetary process, the documents say, leaving unclear whether the initiative could begin sooner through an alternative funding source.
Potential legal issues abound, the most obvious being that civilian law enforcement outside of federal property falls within the purview of the states; the National Guard is typically only activated under states of emergency as declared by state governors. Keeping a permanent, standing force ready to deploy at the president’s command to wherever civil unrest occurs would seem like a violation of that core principle of federalism.
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Via Brennan Center for Justice (the namesake being Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. and not the treacherous former CIA Director John Brennan featured below) (emphasis added):
The Posse Comitatus Act consists of just one sentence: “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
In practice, this means that members of the military who are subject to the law may not participate in civilian law enforcement unless doing so is expressly authorized by a statute or the Constitution…
Members of the National Guard are rarely covered by the Posse Comitatus Act because they usually report to their state or territory’s governor. That means they are free to participate in law enforcement if doing so is consistent with state law. However, when Guard personnel are called into federal service, or “federalized,” they become part of the federal armed forces, which means they are bound by the Posse Comitatus Act until they are returned to state control…
There are no constitutional exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act. The law allows only for express exceptions, and no part of the Constitution expressly empowers the president to use the military to execute the law. This conclusion is consistent with the law’s legislative history, which suggests that its drafters chose to include the language about constitutional exceptions as part of a face-saving compromise, not because they believed any existed.
We saw how the Biden administration abused the national security apparatus to target its domestic political opponents during its reign of terror.
.@JohnBrennan: Biden intel community “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” pic.twitter.com/SjVXWhPhR8
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 20, 2021
It’s somewhat apples and oranges, but the principle of restrained federal power would seem to necessitate the same skepticism of wielding it against domestic civilian populations, no matter who the president is.
The 10th Amendment expressly endowed the states with all governing powers not explicitly enumerated for the federal government, which includes the enforcement of domestic law.
Suppressing the feral Antifa/BLM/#Resistance Redux hordes running amok though the streets with a National Guard strikeforce might sound great, but the question nobody on the right ever seems to ask until it’s too late — see: Patriot Act — is, how would the purview and operational capacity of a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” be weaponized against the right in the future?
