It’s also worth stressing that German states are still far less powerful and less independent than American states (there’s no equivalent to the national guard, for example, and legislative powers are also far more limited beyond education) despite being literally conceived to prevent a Fascist government from taking over.
The National Guard is a major threat to US stability right now, because it has no legal hurdles to overcome in being deployed internally, and the Federal government can call up any state’s units for federal use, even overriding the state governors. Trump has already floated using NG units to assist ICE in deportations in Blue states.
This is also not hypothetical. In 2020 Trump used Natl. guard troops against the wishes of the DC city government, from another state, for policing actions, which is supposed to violate the Posse Commitatus Act, but did an end-run around this by saying they weren’t really federalized. Legal scholars have been objecting ever since, but that’s the precedent now. The author tries to pretend otherwise by rationalizing DC as an unusual edge cases, but the DC government specifically opposed the NG deployment, and was ignored, and now the president is legally immune for any “presidential acts” for term 2.
tl;dr the National Guard has created a legal gray area where the President can order troops into unwilling states, including for policing actions that were supposed to be explicitly prohibited, and maybe not violate the Constitution. Since it’s not 100% clear-cut, no Blue state is going to risk deploying their NG forces or LEOs against them, since it could (literally) be ruled as treason, especially with our SCOTUS.
I don’t know German law around deploying the military internally, but from a cursory glance online it appears to require parliamentary approval and be highly restricted in it’s activities, and never seems to allow for simple policing actions. US Natl. Guard bypasses congress entirely in its current incarnation, and appears unlikely to be restricted by the courts.
The National Guard is a major threat to US stability right now, because it has no legal hurdles to overcome in being deployed internally, and the Federal government can call up any state’s units for federal use, even overriding the state governors. Trump has already floated using NG units to assist ICE in deportations in Blue states.
This is also not hypothetical. In 2020 Trump used Natl. guard troops against the wishes of the DC city government, from another state, for policing actions, which is supposed to violate the Posse Commitatus Act, but did an end-run around this by saying they weren’t really federalized. Legal scholars have been objecting ever since, but that’s the precedent now. The author tries to pretend otherwise by rationalizing DC as an unusual edge cases, but the DC government specifically opposed the NG deployment, and was ignored, and now the president is legally immune for any “presidential acts” for term 2.
tl;dr the National Guard has created a legal gray area where the President can order troops into unwilling states, including for policing actions that were supposed to be explicitly prohibited, and maybe not violate the Constitution. Since it’s not 100% clear-cut, no Blue state is going to risk deploying their NG forces or LEOs against them, since it could (literally) be ruled as treason, especially with our SCOTUS.
I don’t know German law around deploying the military internally, but from a cursory glance online it appears to require parliamentary approval and be highly restricted in it’s activities, and never seems to allow for simple policing actions. US Natl. Guard bypasses congress entirely in its current incarnation, and appears unlikely to be restricted by the courts.