And no one says a word about it.
To the dismay of the nation’s governors, the White House now will be empowered to go over a governor’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.”
One of the last act’s of our recently republican controlled congress was to go along with our republican President’s desire to seize state’s rights! I guess W. really is a Lincoln republican, suspending habeas corpus and taking power away from the state’s to give to the Executive branch has become his modus operandi.
I wonder how this will effect our state constitution considering it is illegal to declare martial law in Tennessee? Hopefully, that will never be tested.
Read more here.
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