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States Consider Calling Back Nat'l Guards

from Iraq
Aaron Glantz OneWorld US

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 31 (OneWorld) - State legislators in Vermont introduced

legislation Wednesday demanding the state's National Guard troops return from Iraq.
Lawmakers in Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania are poised to push
similar legislation.
At the heart of the matter is a contention that President George W. Bush's legal
authority to deploy the National Guard to Iraq has expired.
"Congress laid out a pretty specific mission for the Guard in 2002," Vermont State
Representative Michael Fisher (D-Lincoln) told OneWorld. "That mission was two
things: it was to defend the national security of the United States [against] the threat
posed by Iraq, and, two, to enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council
resolutions. I don't believe there are any credible arguments that the state of Iraq
poses a risk to the Untied States or that there may still be weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq."
"If the president believes there's still a need to have our National Guard in Iraq to
stabilize that country or whatever, it's his job to go back to Congress and ask for that
authorization," Fisher added. "The president doesn't have the authority to
permanently federalize our Guards."
The legislation comes amid increasing antiwar sentiment in the Green Mountain
state. In 2005, voters in 48 Vermont towns approved resolutions calling on the State
Legislature to study the effect on Vermont of numerous deployments to Iraq and
asked Vermont's congressional delegation ''to work to restore a proper balance
between the powers of the states and that of the federal government over state
National Guard units."
The Vermont State Legislature also asked the president and the Congress to
withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq.
Vermont, like other rural parts of the country, has suffered disproportionately from
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, say analysts. A November 2006 report by the
Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire found soldiers from rural
Vermont had the highest death rate in the nation.
A June 2007 survey sponsored by the nonpartisan Center for Rural Strategies found
rural support for the war slipping: some 45 percent of rural Americans said then that
the United States should "stay the course" in Iraq, down from 51 percent in 2004.
And 60 percent of respondents said they knew someone serving in Iraq or
Afghanistan.
Despite popular sentiment and rising casualties, Vermont's Republican Gov. Jim
Douglas reacted coldly to Fisher's legislation.
"This is a federal issue," spokesman Jason Gibbs told the Burlington Free Press. "Gov.
Douglas would like to see Washington develop a strategy to bring the troops home."
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The Free Press reported that, according to Gibbs, the Vermont governor's legal staff
looked into the authority over the National Guard when the issue was under public
scrutiny several years ago. They found that states had no legal basis for refusing to
deploy National Guard units, Gibbs said. "To change that, Congress would have to
act."
This is not the first time states have looked into recalling their National Guards from
an unpopular foreign conflict.
In the 1986, several governors opposed to President Ronald Reagan's covert military
operations in Central America refused to allow their National Guard units to
participate in exercises there.
That fall, Congress, led by Mississippi Congressmen and longtime National Guard ally
G. V. "Sonny" Montgomery, passed an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act
that prevented governors from withholding units from federal training in the future.
Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich took the lead in challenging the new law, but after
losing several appeals, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the law's
constitutionality in 1990.
Many constitutional authorities argue that the Montgomery Amendment essentially
ended any power a governor might have to veto deployment of National Guard units.
But the bill's backers say the war in Iraq is different than the 1980s conflict in Central
America.
"In the 1980s, President Reagan said he wanted to send the National Guard to
Central America for 'training,'" said Benson Scotch, a former chief staff attorney to
Vermont's Supreme Court, who helped write the bill. "There is no such thing as a
limited authorization by Congress for a permanent ongoing call-up."