In one sense, the decisions of the governors of Ohio, Mississippi, South Carolina and West Virginia to send National Guard troops from their states to aid President Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover of Washington, D.C., should not have surprised anyone. Like their GOP colleagues in Congress, these red-state executives are eager to show their fealty to the MAGA leader. But in another sense, it is a truly stunning development coming from politicians who love nothing more than to tout their allegiance to the Constitution and the Second Amendment.
Just five months ago, West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey proclaimed such allegiance when he signed three pieces of legislation that his office said were “meant to protect the 2nd Amendment rights of West Virginians.” Morrisey said at the time: “As Governor, I will always support and defend West Virginians’ God-given constitutional rights. The bills I signed today further enshrine West Virginia’s strong support for the Second Amendment.”
This is not the first time that President Trump has tested the loyalty of red-state governors in this way.
But let’s compare the decisions of Morrissey, South Carolina’s Henry McMaster, Mississippi's Tate Reeves and Ohio’s Mike DeWine to deploy their states’ National Guard with the language of the Second Amendment. It reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Note why the militia is needed: for the “security of a free State” [emphasis added]. That is hardly what Donald Trump’s use of the National Guard is designed to secure.
The GOP governors likely know that. But Trump carried all but seven of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties and won 55% of the popular vote. He received 58% of the vote in South Carolina and 70% in West Virginia, where he also carried every county. The governors were eager to make clear that they, as McMaster explained, stand "with President Trump as he works to restore law and order to our nation’s capital.” Or take Morrisey, who said, “West Virginia is proud to stand with President Trump in his effort to restore pride and beauty to our nation’s capital.”
This is not the first time that Trump has tested the loyalty of red-state governors in this way. In June 2020, during the nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd, he asked state chief executives from across the country to send National Guard to Washington, D.C.
As The Washington Post reported at the time: “The request had the effect of cleaving state militias along partisan lines, according to interviews and internal Guard documents. While red states jumped to answer the president’s call, governors and Guard commanders in blue states were incredulous.”
“The result,” the Post continues, “was a deployment to the nation’s capital that military historians say appears to have been without precedent: Over 98 percent of the 3,800 troops that arrived in the District came from states with Republican governors.”
Five years later, the deployment of troops from Trump-loving states in the District of Columbia, where every one of Trump’s Democratic opponents has received over 90% of the vote and where Blacks make up almost 45% of the population, is no less disturbing. It looks like another effort to achieve “total domination” — as Trump put it in 2020 — in the least Trump friendly place in the country.
Alexander Hamilton thought it was important that states have their own military force.
“Total domination” by the federal government was hardly the rallying cry for the people who wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Quite to the contrary. They had seen firsthand the British use military forces to subdue and oppress people in the colonies. And they feared “that the president would use standing armies to oppress the citizens, as the British had done, and turn us into a garrison state," as Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., then serving in the House, wrote in 2020.
The drafters of the Declaration of Independence included among the British monarchy’s “repeated injuries and usurpations” the following: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures; He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power;” and kept “large bodies of armed troops among us.”
That’s why people like Alexander Hamilton thought it was important that states have their own military force. They thought state militias would resist, not aid, the federal government, should it want to follow the British example.
Hamilton made this clear in 1788, before the ratification of the Constitution or the Second Amendment. “If standing armies,” he wrote, “are dangerous to liberty, an efficacious power over the militia, in the body to whose care the protection of the State is committed, ought, as far as possible, to take away the inducement and the pretext to such unfriendly institutions.”
Hamilton hoped that militias controlled by the states would be all that would be necessary to assure peace in the new Republic and did not think that they ever would threaten liberty. They would, after all, be composed of “our sons, our brothers, our neighbors, our fellow-citizens.”
The National Guard had its origins in the militias about which Hamilton wrote. The Guard traces its start to 1636, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony established the first colonial militia.
Whatever their views on whether the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms, historians generally agree that one of the key purposes of the amendment was to ensure that states had the resources needed to resist encroachments on liberty perpetrated by the federal government. As Supreme Court Justice James McReynolds put it in 1939, “In a militia, the character of the labourer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier.”
Troops from Ohio, South Carolina, Mississippi and West Virginia deployed in Washington are being asked to display the character of soldiers, not that of the “neighbors” that Hamilton envisioned. Hamilton thought that there would be no danger “from men who are daily mingling with the rest of their countrymen and who participate with them in the same feelings, sentiments, habits, and interests.”
Sending members of state National Guards to a place different in “feelings, sentiments, habits and interests” from the District of Columbia may please the president. But it should not please Americans eager to preserve freedom and honor the legacy of the Founding generation.