Skip to main content

Will President Obama nix the US Army's new domestic mission?

I'd write a post breaking the news that the Pentagon (read SecDef Gates of both the current and soon-to-be administrations) is looking more an more seriously at employing American soldiers under Federal control in domestic law enforcement, peace-keeping, and disaster-relief rolls, like my friends at Anti-war.com or Delawareliberal, except....

That I first posted on the issue almost exactly three months ago, and followed it up several days ago.

The steady erosion of posse comitatus restrictions on national military forces has been under way since the 1980s, primarily through the vehicles of thewar on drugs and the war on brown people without papers.

It's a done deal. The 3rd Infantry Division is not only being assigned the duty under Northcom, it's being expanded into the Army's largest division (at 25,000 troops with five brigades) to handle the task.

So the question to ask now is, "What is President Obama going to do about it?"

Does he support the use of Federally controlled military force in a domestic setting, or does he support constitutional limitations on the use of the military?

A lot of campaign rhetoric and a lot of credibility is--or should be--riding here. I've seen the famous editorial cartoon of Barack sitting in the Oval Office taping the US Constitution back together.

So here's a place to start.

President Barack Obama could issue an Executive Order during the first week of his Presidency that forbids the use of Federal military forces in situations of domestic unrest that fall short of the Constitutional definition of insurrection.

There are plenty of military forces available, trained for disaster relief and useful for local security operations, in the National Guard. There are only two drawbacks, from the imperial perspective, about relying on them.

1) They'd have to be home to be used.

2) They fall under the statutory authority of the Governor, not the Feds, and most of the soldiers are citizens of the states wherein they might be employed. Both of these items are a great check on the tendency of the Federal government to misuse such forces internally.

Anybody care to bet that President Obama will choose to accept a strict constitutional limit on the domestic use of military force?

I've got some mortgage money here that says otherwise.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?