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Over the last few years, many states and municipalities passed resolutions calling on the President and Congress to end the war and bring our troops home to American soil. Even though this resolution movement spread across the country, many saw these resolutions as largely symbolic and as carrying little political weight.

Today we launch a new movement that is designed to use the weight that states do have in governing their national guards. This bill says in short: “You in the Administration and Congress made up the rules under which State National Guard members were deployed to Iraq. It is time to follow those rules. The authority to keep State National Guard troops in Iraq has expired.”

In the same spirit of good faith and patriotism with which they served, please issue the orders to bring them home.

The bill is rooted in the Constitution and laws of the United States:
 

• Persons enlisting in the State Guard simultaneously enlist in the National Guard of the United States, a part of the Army. The enlistees retain their status as State Guard members unless and until ordered to active federal duty, and they revert to state status upon being released from federal service.
• Each state's Guard unit is controlled by the governor unless called up for federal duty by the president pursuant to his authority under law.
• The President obtained his authority for calling the State Guard to serve in Iraq from a 2002 congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which limited the authorization to the purposes of defending the national security from Iraqi threats and to enforce UN Security Council Resolutions relating to Iraq. Neither the AUMF nor any other law authorizes an indefinite assignment of State Guard members to the National Guard of the United States.
• The purposes set forth in the AUMF have been achieved.  No weapons of mass destruction were ever found and therefore no UN Resolutions remain to be enforced.  Clearly, the Iraqi government does not pose a threat to our national security.
• Courts have historically been reluctant to decide cases involving control of the Armed Forces, but whether they will or won’t hear this case, the State has a strong interest in protecting the rights of members of the Guard, and the Governor, as Commander-in-Chief of the Guard, has the same interest.

This bill clarifies that, in the absence of any authority to keep the State Guard in Federal service, the authority over them should revert back to the State.  Congress would have to pass a new AUMF to keep our State Guards under Federal control. This bill demands that the State Guards be released from their Federal service and calls for their return. The request is not rooted in the location, purpose, type, or schedule of duty for which they were called up under the AUMF. We simply want the constitution and the laws governing the State Guards to be followed.

Time’s up under the law. Bring them home.

~ Vermont Representative Michael Fisher