On soldiers in the city

The Guardian reports that National Guard troops have been stationed in Washington, D.C. since last August — a deployment now more than a year in duration — and that residents of the capital describe their daily lives as existing inside what they call 'a city under siege.' I am told that Washingtonians have organized mutual support networks and nightly gatherings in public parks as a form of quiet, peaceable resistance. I engage with this not as a partisan matter but as a question of constitutional character.

Let me be plain about the principle I hold most firmly: civilian authority over military force is not a preference or a tradition to be suspended when inconvenient. It is the structural guarantee that separates a republic from every other arrangement of power. The moment a government finds it routine to station armed forces among its own peaceable citizens — not in response to an invasion, not to suppress an insurrection that courts and civil law cannot reach, but as a sustained posture of domestic control — it has begun a habit that is very difficult to unlearn.

I am aware that emergencies are real and that governments must sometimes act with dispatch. I led armies. I know what force is for. But force deployed against one's own citizenry, in the seat of the national government, for a duration exceeding twelve months, is no longer an emergency measure. It has become policy. And when military deployment becomes policy in the capital, the question every citizen must ask is: what does this normalize for the next administration, and the one after that?

The Guardian's account of residents gathering with pots and pans in Lincoln Park — a park named, as it happens, for a president who preserved the Union without making permanent soldiers of the streets — strikes me as precisely the kind of civic instinct the Republic depends upon. People banding together not in violence but in visible, communal assertion of their presence and their dignity. That is the citizenry behaving as it should. The question is whether the government is behaving as it should.

I will not render a verdict on the specific legal authorities cited, for I cannot claim knowledge of the precise statutes and court interpretations that govern such deployments in this century — that judgment belongs to lawyers and to judges. But I can say this: the rule of law means that extraordinary measures require extraordinary justification, renewed and examined continuously, not merely invoked once and allowed to persist. A free people should demand that justification at regular intervals, loudly and through every lawful channel available to them.

My counsel to those who find this troubling — and to those who do not — is the same: resist the temptation to evaluate this solely through the lens of which faction ordered it or which faction objects. Ask instead what precedent is being set, what institutional habit is being formed, and whether you would be equally comfortable if the administration you least favored inherited this posture and these powers. The office outlasts the officeholder. The precedent outlasts the emergency.