WASHINGTON — The subject of Thursday’s hearing was one of the biggest political controversies of President Trump’s second term: His use of the National Guard within the United States.
Democrats on the Senate Armed Service Committee railed against the deployment of the National Guard to American cities. Some Republicans on the committee vigorously defended those urban deployments.
Sen. Dan Sullivan did neither. When it was his turn to speak, he vigorously defended Guard deployments that no one is arguing about. He spoke about the National Guard’s role repelling Russian and Chinese forces over the Pacific and the Bering Sea.
“These are front-line operations going directly against our adversaries. Wing to wing, when our fighters go intercept Russian bear bombers and MiGs that are armed,” Sullivan said. “Dangerous work. We do it all the time up in Alaska.”
Sullivan is one of 18 Republican senators running for reelection next year. Trump’s big controversies put them on a political tightrope and how they find balance could determine their political futures. If they lean away from Trump they risk becoming his target on social media. But it could prove dangerous to lean too far toward Trump, too, if some of the president’s actions become toxic to voters.
Sullivan leaned uncharacteristically to the left Thursday afternoon, with a vote to extend health care tax subsidies. That morning, at the Armed Service Committee, he employed another option: the sidestep.
He drew attention to the National Guard’s rescues after fierce storms washed houses away in Western Alaska in October. And, Sullivan said, when he was in the Marines in the 1990s, some of his battalion had domestic deployments, to the southern border and to fight forest fires in the Pacific Northwest.
“We were motivated Marines. President of the United States told us to go different places, and we went,” he said. “That's what you do in the military.”
Sullivan did not engage Thursday as Democrats, and Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, spoke passionately against the urban deployments.
“That the President has the power to, in his own mind, decide what an emergency is and then deploy troops into our cities, I think, is exceedingly dangerous,” King said at the hearing. “And the people who founded this country thought so, too.”
King read the words of several Founding Fathers who warned that if a president has a standing army to use against his own people, he’ll become a tyrant.
Pentagon attorney Charles Young countered that President George Washington himself sent troops to put down the Whisky Rebellion, after Pennsylvanians tarred and feathered a tax collector. And Young cited 19th century Supreme Court decisions to argue that in fact, it IS up to the president to decide what’s an emergency.
Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana was one of the Republicans who gave a full-throated defense of the urban deployments, in support of the Trump administration’s massive deportation campaign. Sheehy addressed another Pentagon witness, Gen. Gregory Guillot, the top officer responsible for the defense of North America.
“As a military commander,” Sheehy asked, “what do you feel is a greater threat to our national security? Five hundred volunteers, trained National Guardsmen walking the streets of our cities, or 20 million illegal immigrants who have entered this country over the past five years?”
Sheehy wasn’t done: “Is the influence of transnational criminal organizations that fill our country with fentanyl, poison, various other drugs, illicit activity, human trafficking? Is that a national security threat?”
The general’s answer did not matter. Sheehy, who doesn’t face voters until the middle of the next president’s term, was taking a stand.
