The critics—including former Defense Secretary James Mattis—have it precisely backward: Deploying the U.S. military for domestic security missions is all about protecting our Constitutional rights and liberties.
There has been a lot of elite Sturm und Drang over President Trump’s announcement last week that he would deploy the active-duty military forces to restore “law and order” in American cities torn asunder by violent rioting and looting.
Eighty-nine former defense officials, for instance, have published a piece in the Washington Post saying they “are alarmed at how the president is betraying [his] oath [of office] by threatening to order members of the U.S. military to violate the rights of their fellow Americans.”
“President Trump has given governors a stark choice,” they insist: “either end the protests that continue to demand equal justice under our laws, or expect that he will send active-duty military units into their states.”
Of course, Trump does not express himself well. He is a poor communicator who often uses awkward terminology and cringe-inducing rhetoric.
But the idea that he wishes to employ the military to violate the Constitutional rights of peaceably assembling, law-abiding Americans is ludicrous. You have to be a blinkered anti-Trump zealot to believe that the president is somehow conspiring to use the military to squelch dissent.
There is absolutely no evidence for this fervid, far-fetched proposition. It reflects the lurid imaginations of anti-Trump partisans, not objective, empirical reality.
Averting Violence. The truth, in fact, is quite the opposite: the rationale for deploying active-duty military forces is precisely to protect the Constitutional rights of peaceably assembling Americans from what Sen. Tom Cotton has righty called “nihilist criminals and cadres of left-wing radicals like Antifa.”
These criminals and radicals, Cotton explains, have marred the protests with an “orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic.”
This orgy of violence seems to have abated somewhat in the past couple of days; however, rioting and looting is still a real and omnipresent problem. Indeed, as the New York Post reports:
“Violence has been used multiple times during what could have been and what should have been peaceful protests,” [NYPD Commissioner Dermot] Shea said at a live-streamed press conference Thursday evening
[…]
There have been 292 members of the force who suffered injuries as some of the demonstrations have seen violent clashes, cops said.
As of June 3, according to the Forbes, at least 12 people have been killed and hundreds of others injured in the protests, including a black federal police officer in Oakland, California; a retired black police captain in St. Louis; and a former Indiana University football player and local business owner who is also black.
“Four police officers were shot in downtown St. Louis early Tuesday, [June 2, 2020], as a day of peaceful protests turned into a violent and destructive night in the city,” reports the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
In Las Vegas, reports the Daily Beast,
an officer responding to a looting incident was reportedly shot in the head early Tuesday, [June 2, 2020], after exchanging gunfire with an angry mob, according to several Nevada news sources.
County Sheriff Joe Lombardo told the Las Vegas Review Journal that the officer survived. “He is in extremely critical condition on life support,” Lombardo said “This is a sad night for our LVMPD family and a tragic night for our community.”
Mad Dog Mattis. Yet, in the face of these facts—this incontrovertible empirical evidence—the former Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, declared:
We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.
With all due respect to Secretary Mattis, this is ludicrous and nonsensical. Of course we have to be “distracted” or concerned about the reportedly small number of lawbreakers wreaking havoc in our nation’s cities.
Why? Precisely because they threaten the safety and well-being of the “thousands of people of conscience” Mattis rightly says we need to protect.
Moreover, as Pat Buchanan observes:
In Mattis’ statement, one finds not a word of sympathy or support for the police bearing the brunt of mob brutality for defending the communities they serve, while defending the constitutional right of the protesters to curse them as racist and rogue cops.
Trump Derangement Syndrome. I understand why Mattis doesn’t like Trump. His disdain for the president he once served is completely legitimate and understandable.
But Mattis’ failure to understand that violent thugs who threaten to kill the innocent need to be identified and stopped—and by deadly force if necessary—is wrong, inexcusable and unconscionable. Just because Trump proposes something doesn’t make it wrong, dangerous, and unconstitutional.
Too many people—including Mattis and the aforementioned 89 former defense officials—have allowed their disdain for Trump to cloud their judgment and analysis.
In truth, as Ross Douthat has explained, while Trump may well have authoritarian instincts,
real political authority, the power to rule and not just to survive, is something that Donald Trump conspicuously does not seem to want.
Executive Protection. Trump’s critics can and do point to one instance where it can be argued Trump may have tried to infringe upon the Constitutional rights of the protesters.
But that instance—outside of the White House, June 1, as Trump and his team walked to the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had been attacked and burned the night before—is the exception that proves the rule.
Trump’s decision to walk to the church apparently was not well communicated to the Secret Service, U.S. Park Service, and other federal law enforcement agencies. These agencies had to act quickly, therefore, to ensure the president’s safety. And ensuring the president’s safety, remember, is their job.
As the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney points out:
If Trump knew he was going to do this [walk from the White House to the church], he could have had the Secret Service set up the barricade further out before the evening protests got crowded. Then, there would have been no shoving or smoke grenades needed.
Instead, as WUSA 9 reports, “pepper balls and smoke canisters, which irritate the eyes and throat and cause coughing, [were used] to disperse the protesters.”
This is unfortunate. But given the circumstances—the need to ensure the president’s safety at a time when violent riots and looting were taking place nationwide, and police and innocent bystanders were being killed as a result—these actions are understandable and hardly constitute a gratuitous assault on First Amendment rights.
Indeed, the incident resulted from a lack of planning and coordination, and not because of any Machiavellian plot to betray the Constitution.
Historical Precedent. In truth, as even the 89 aforementioned defense officials acknowledge: “several past presidents have called on our armed services to provide additional aid to law enforcement in times of national crisis—among them Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.”
Eisenhower, Cotton notes, federalized the the Arkansas National Guard and called in the 101st Airborne Division to protect the civil rights of black school children during a time of integration.
Were the active-duty military to be deployed domestically to American cities torn asunder by violent rioting and looting, they would, likewise, be protecting basic civil rights—namely, the Constitutionally protected right to peaceably assemble without fear of bodily harm, injury or death.
That is a wholly legitimate use of the Armed Forces of the United States.
It won’t happen. Trump already has ordered the National Guard to leave Washington, D.C.; the states and mayors don’t want active-duty military units; and the protests seem to have turned more peaceful and less violent in recent days.
Plus: there may well be prudential and political arguments against using active-duty military units to restore peace, safety and the rule of law to America’s cities. However, the notion that doing so is an unprecedented attack on Constitutional liberties is simply absurd and completely untrue.
Active-Duty Military. Some critics, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), complain that the active-duty military is untrained and unprepared for law enforcement work; but this, too, is untrue.
In fact, we have military police units that are specifically trained to perform law enforcement functions, including riot and crowd control. The idea that U.S military personnel are trained only to shoot and kill is not something that anyone familiar with the U.S. military would ever say or suggest.
It’s certainly not something that anyone familiar with the U.S. military mission in Kosovo (1990’s), Iraq or Afghanistan (2000’s) would every say or suggest, since these missions involved peacekeeping, stability and law enforcement operations to a very considerable extent.
The bottom line: use of the U.S. military to safeguard important Constitutional rights is not some lunatic-fringe idea that poses an inherent threat to American democracy.
To the contrary: there is ample historical precedent for this idea, and it can be wise public policy. The U.S. military is trained, ready and prepared for such a mission regardless of who is president.
Donald Trump has nothing to do with it.
Feature photo credit: Police Chief magazine.
