President Trump's True Power Over the National Guard, Explained
Feb 18, 2017
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53266/president-trump-national-guard/
I am a Cavalryman, or at least I once was. In days gone by I commanded some of the men of the 7th Cavalry. We rode iron steeds, and my men were worthy successors to their historical forefathers. Of course everyone knows what happened to the 7th along the Little Bighorn in 1876. But you might not know how the regiment started. See, we started fighting racists and those who believed that real Americans came in only one color.
The regiment was created in the wake of the Civil War. From its inception, it had one primary mission: patrolling the former rebellious states that had fought against America, and hunting down the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, the unit was spread across the South for nearly a decade.
Then the conservative whites in the states that tried to destroy the United States gained a political foothold, and a presidential election hung in the balance. The "compromise" to end the deadlock was that the U.S. government would stop using U.S. troops to enforce laws about things like voting, and lynching, and would pull out of the South entirely. That was 1878. The law was the Posse Comitatus Act.
Now, for the first time in more than 130 years, there seems to be at least top-level consideration for how to run over that law.