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“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Mattis said in the statement. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”
Mattis continued: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”
Allen warned that Trump’s ongoing threats to send U.S. military troops into states whose governors do not sufficiently “dominate” the protests should be chilling to all Americans.
“There is no precedent in modern U.S. history for a president to wield federal troops in a state or municipality over the objections of the respective governor,” Allen wrote. “Right now, the last thing the country needs — and, frankly, the U.S. military needs — is the appearance of U.S. soldiers carrying out the president’s intent by descending on American citizens. This could wreck the high regard Americans have for their military, and much more.”
In fact, there is such a precedent, as Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., pointed out in a controversial op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday: the dispatch of federal troops to Southern states, including Arkansas, to enforce desegregation orders. “Gov. Orval Faubus, a racist Democrat, mobilized our National Guard in 1957 to obstruct desegregation at Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower federalized the Guard and called in the 101st Airborne in response. The failure to do so, he said, ‘would be tantamount to acquiescence in anarchy,’” Cotton wrote.
The difference, of course, is that Faubus and other Southern governors were refusing to enforce the law and the Constitution, as ordered by the federal courts. In the present situation, state authorities are seeking to enforce the peace, and reserving for themselves the right, as the law and Constitution provide, to decide if they need help from the U.S. military.
Allen concluded his essay with a warning, and call to action.
“At nearly the same moment that Americans were being beaten near the White House on behalf of their president, George Floyd’s brother Terrence Floyd visited the site of George’s murder,” Allen wrote. “Overcome with grief and anger, he loudly upbraided the crowd for tarnishing his brother’s memory with violence and looting. And then he told Americans what to do: vote. ‘Educate yourselves,’ he said, ‘there’s a lot of us.’ So, while June 1 could easily be confused with a day of shame and peril if we listen to Donald Trump, if instead we listen to Terrence Floyd, it is a day of hope.”