One way to now a chess match is about to begin is to see people place pieces on a chessboard. There is no thread of our possible history that is colored 'good' for the next couple of years that starts off with deploying the NG in Washington, D.C. As a pre-emptive move it is an overt threat and as a response to something that is actually happening it is complete overkill. Either way, trouble is brewing.
If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Aside from street protests and rallies (which NG should scrupulously facilitate for 1A reasons; DC itself has been fairly bad about this in the past, too), I don't think most local policing is highly political. Yes, DC residents are losing some democratic control over their local policing, which is bad, but DC has also done a bad job with local policing for a long time.
(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)
For me it doesn't really raise any interesting questions at all: things are statistically not 'bad' per se, besides, you could trade your democracy for an autocracy or a dictatorship and end up 'safe' from small crime but meanwhile have your whole country looted.
Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).
>Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)
I hope you don’t find yourself in one of the out groups in the fascist state you seem so eager for. There’s a reason you don’t turn the military on the citizenry. They’re for fighting the enemies of the nation and the police are for maintaining order. When the military become the police, the citizenry become the enemy of the nation.
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC
I don't know how you could measure this, since DC saw a very significant reduction in crime last year without any interference from the National Guard. If there are further reductions this year, that would be a continuation of a trend, not a new phenomenon.
Oh, you just have to look around the world to see how effectively a dictator's deployment of national armed force reduces the official crime statistics. There's absolutely positively zero doubt in mind that will be a reported outcome :-)
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC
Beijing is the safest city I've ever lived in. A heavily policed city with an authoritarian government will give you all the safety and low crime rates you desire.
It comes at a cost. Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.
The crime rates in DC have been dramatically falling over the last couple years, just as they have been falling across most cities in the country for the last couple decades.
For one I would not accept that trade off at all. But secondly it's exceedingly unlikely. Policing has barely any impact on crime rate. The governor of NYC deployed national guard to the subways and they stand around doing nothing. Police also routinely stand around doing nothing. Crime spiked from the pandemic and dropped when it ended. No public policy has made more than a marginal impact. Crime rate is dictated by economics.
What are 10000 federal agents and soldiers going to do? Walk around looking for crime to stop? DC has the most police per capita of any city in America. How much crime do they stop by standing around? At best they respond to 911 calls and federal agents aren't plugged in to 911. What the hell are they going to do about crime that isn't in the streets? And are they going to do traffic enforcement because that's probably 99% of the unenforced crime in any city.
Weigh that against Pam Bondi stating in no uncertain terms that DC will be completely crime free in short order. This is pure theater.
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
> [...] raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Counter-argument: things have not been bad. In DC or elsewhere. It's a meme. In fact DC crime statistics, like national ones, have been trending steadily downward for decades. They burp with immediate inputs, like spiking over the pandemic when formerly-employed folks found time to get in more trouble, but... they aren't bad.
DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe. All these places partisan media likes to paint as urban hellscapes are in fact historically safe cities in which to live and do business.
The answer to "why things have been so bad for so long" is inside your television, basically. It's not on the streets of DC.
Poverty is the underlying driver of most crime. Poverty, in turn, is the result of wealth hoarding by the ruling class.
Authoritarian intervention can lower crime at the expense of democratic rights. (Let’s not kid ourselves, the NG will not be used to “facilitate” protest in DC.). Effectively, an authoritarian response to crime further consolidates the power of the ruling class.
Trump has steadily encroached on constitutional rights throughout his term. He is indifferent to the root causes of crime. He is really only interested in crime insofar as it allows him to identify more people he doesn’t like as criminals, and to use harsher measures against them.
In March 2024, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, announced that she would deploy 750 members of the National Guard to New York’s subway system.
Troops in military uniforms patrolled the subway with rifles.
Nobody raised an eye and nobody in this thread apparently even remembers.
National Guard has deployed to Washington DC dozens of times already - many times to combat crime and disturbances. (Technically hundreds of times if you count inaugurations).
I think a lot of people were also angry about that, and I think it may be a contributing factor to the success of Mamdani. As part of the feud between state-level and city-level politics, which is pretty intense despite being both nominally "D" because American politics doesn't have enough parties.
1) Threaten to lockup "homegrowns" in a foreign prison?
2) Arrest people for criticizing the war in Gaza?
3) Use the justice department to further a political agenda? (see Eric Adams case)
4) Revoke security clearances of law firms representing her opponents?
Yeah, keep pretending that these two actions are similar and this is just Democrats being hyperbolic again. Trump is using this as revenge against his political opponents since most in DC don't support him. The fact we're still pretending these two parties are the same is unbelievable.
The reason why nobody raised an eye then is because the people doing that weren't making all of the pre-requisite moves to set up a dictatorship. It was - of course - still misguided and it didn't work. Trump is using DC either simply 'because he can' (absent any actual reason), or as a trial ground to normalize such deployment to other cities in the future (he tried that once and failed). It also serves as a distraction from his Epstein files woes.
March 2024 was a different world than the one we live in today, and if you haven't been following the news for the last 6 months then you are of course excused but if you have been following the news you know that already.
> So when the military was deployed to LA due to ICE riots
ICE was the entity acting lawlessly, and tht were sent to support it.
>then they left without incident
They did not “leave withot incident”. Except in the sense that no additional incident was caused by their departure.
But, yes, the LA deployment was both a test and a warning sign (and, like the DC one, also a deliberate distraction from other things the Administration wanted to take a less prominent place in the national discussion at the time.)
Definitely a warning sign, even if the warning light went out again. It may even have had a slightly positive effect in waking up the Democrat governor.
A staged "carjacking" that the police got lucky enough to "stumble upon" — the "victim" of which just so happened to be the DOGE employee known as "Big Balls" — isn't enough justification for the presence of the National Guard for you?
Not a fan of the national guard deployment, but I don’t see why they would bother staging a carjacking when they can reference the very real murder of a congressional intern last month.
Nah, it's not justification at all that some kid was trying to buy ket and got his ass beat on a bad drug deal that we need to deploy the whole NG for this.
>There is no thread of our possible history that is colored 'good' for the next couple of years that starts off with deploying the NG in Washington, D.C.
What if it helps clean up the homeless encampments and crime like Gavin Newsom did in San Francisco when Xi visited recently? That would be good!
D.C. is a dump and has been my entire life. There's been a drop in homicides since the peak in 2023, but last year was still 15% higher than in 2019: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/01/02/homicid.... In 2023, the homicide rate in D.C. was 39 per 100k people. This is only a little better than the civilian death rate in Iraq when it peaked in 2014 during ISIS (that was around 50 per 100k).
This is not a "guns" issue, it's a policing issue. Idaho has among the most guns of any state in the union, and Boise is as safe as a western European city, with 1/30th the homicide rate of D.C. Even several large U.S. cities, like Austin, El Paso, and Virginia Beach, have homicide rates 1/10th or less of D.C.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b....
D.C. is a rich city surrounded by wealthy suburbs. There's no reason for it to be as unsafe as decaying post-industrial cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore.
A big part of the reason why DC has these problems is because they do not control much of their own budgeting due to the nature of how the federal government manages the territory.
Calling it a "dump" is interesting, especially compared to some other cities that have much larger populations, budget, and representation. I've been in the DMV for nearly twenty years and much prefer living here than other metro areas because it is simply a lot cleaner and safer. Baltimore and Philadelphia are both cities that are much worse than living in DC proper.
Do you live in DC or travel there frequently? It's very much not a dump. There are great museums, great parks, a vibrant food and nightlife scene, and many beautiful neighborhoods. There is a lot of poverty (not very visible to tourists), and there is some homelessness (which is visible), but it remains a great city to visit and to live in.
It’s really the administration of whatever SCOTUS lets him get away with. Trump - by pressure testing the law - lets SCOTUS reimagine the constitutional order.
Too much of the focus is on Trump and not nearly enough on the people who are willing to vote for such an obviously corrupt conman. Trump will be dead within a decade, but these voters who actually want a dictator as long as he hurts the people they think should be hurt will be voting for generations.
Trump is a symptom of the cancer of conservatism. He’s the inevitable result of conservative politics and positioning over the last 40+ years. The GOP wanted to make an environment where their guy could never be punished for watergate levels of blatant criminal offense and they fucking succeeded.
Well, you can round down everything short of outright civil war to 'zero' but then you might miss important signals that you could act on. That doomsday message so far seems to be largely on the money, and in some ways has already been exceeded. That doesn't mean it can't get much worse.
The old guard of nonfascist Republicans wasn't purged until late in the last Trump term and into the period between Trump terms, and was particularly strong in the first half of the last term, the second half of last term, the Democrats controlled the House, limiting. There was not a trifecta under a fully Trump-aligned Republican Party until the current term. That makes a difference in outcomes, and has already made obvious differences in outcomes in exactly the direction discussed.
> The National Guard was there on January 6, though they were delayed several hours.
They were? I didn't see them keeping the mob at bay, or protecting the Capital from being stormed, in the footage I saw. Do you have a link to said footage that you can provide?
Setting aside whether federalizing D.C. policing is wise, there’s a simple checkbook question people miss: Guard deployments aren’t free.
In D.C. 2020, the Guard put the peak daily cost at ~$2.65M for ~5,000 troops, about $530 per Guard/day. That’s a decent order-of-magnitude yardstick for today. Source: Reuters (contemporaneous) – https://www.reuters.com/article/world/what-was-the-cost-for-the-national-guard-to-deploy-in-dc-up-to-26-million-a-idUSKBN23J05Y/
For a rough scale: 800–1,200 troops = mid–six figures per day, before you add transport/lodging decisions that move the number a lot. A recent LA activation was budgeted $134M for 60 days ($2.2M/day) off DoD testimony, which matches that ballpark.
I've often asked what the point of constitutional monarchies were, but this seems like a good one. The king has nearly no power. He's a figurehead. He's just there to press the "STOP" button when things have gotten out of hand. But whenever a king abuses this power, the lawmakers cut it from him. So he just sits there in a palace, living luxuriously from tax money. In good times, we ask why he's allowed to do this (but not out loud, that would be illegal).
Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police. In absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, there's no separation between the police and the army; soldiers are out there enforcing the law. In constitutional monarchies, you can't elect someone into Commander-in-Chief; the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.
I'm not saying it's a better system by any means - the US of A has seen plenty of wars and maybe it's best to have an elected Commander-in-Chief. But just some thought from a systems design standpoint.
A constitutional monarchy is not something which has a "point" in some sort of intelligent design sense. You wouldn't design one that way.
A constitutional monarchy is what you get starting from an absolute monarchy and gradually draining the power out of it and transferring it to democratic institutions. It then satisfies the demand of the public who want the roleplay of an absolute ruler, and are scared of a fully egalitarian system, but without letting them actually do any absolutism.
King Charles does not have operational control of the military. He only has a large amount of personal loyalty, which is not quite the same thing. He holds a number of operational ranks from his service, from which he is retired, and a number of honorary senior titles.
The UK is just as vulnerable to troops-on-the-streets fascism as anywhere else. (Bloody Sunday etc)
It's not only about roleplay - it's also an actual power struggle that was never faught to completion, but instead slowed down, paused, or drained as you said. But because the monarchies were never pushed out, they didn't have much reason to play dirty and use their influence and money to regain hard power, in self defence.
The downside is of course, the monetary and social costs of having such an organ. But perhaps it's useful in the same sense the appendix is. When an illness catches the intestines, the appendix can best case be a reservoir of good and recolonize the intestines. Something like that happened in Spain.
> Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police.
That's not true in the case of European constitutional monarchies. The elected government has total power except for some very specific duties around the administration of government, like dissolving parliament. And even then, those are largely ceremonial.
I do think having so much power with one person who cannot easily be replaced at any point is bad for democratic government. In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant.
True, it doesn't apply everywhere. I'm thinking rights get cut when abused. Under the Meiji Constitution (1889-1947), Japan's emperor was Commander-in-Chief, and after the end of WW2, he was not. But even as a figurehead, he was useful in uniting the factions to end the war when multiple parties wanted to keep it going.
"In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant."
Though it feels like what we have now is poorly performing PMs replaced by another poorly performing PM. Often one that promises to do the opposite of what the previous PM did, then forgets the promises or blames them on something else.
To this day, bullet holes remain in the ceiling of the Spanish parliament building to remind them of the coup attempt. I can't find it anymore, but there was a good drama movie about these events on Netflix a while ago.
> I've often asked what the point of constitutional monarchies were, but this seems like a good one.
Bagehot divided the dignified and the efficient. I've long thought that one glaring downside of the American presidential system is that it tries to combine the two roles in one office.
Non-monarchic parliamentary democracies often separate the head of government (prime minister) and chief of state (president); it’s not exclusively a thing done by Constitutional monarchies. Instead, lacking the separation is, among representative democracies, a distinguishing (mis)feature of Presidential systems.
> the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.
This only works on paper, and on paper congress or SCOTUS would've stepped in much sooner.
In practice, the monarch either has a lot of power, or does whatever the real head of government wants. Especially with how Trump can claim that he has the mandate of the people given that he won the election, and it's not like he doesn't wrap his motives behind legitimate claims. It's pretty easy to just claim that he has to do X for the security of the nation.
In reality, if the US had a monarch, they too would've gone along with whatever Trump wanted because to not do so is the nuclear option. It would be the equivalent of states trying to secede or not recognizing the current administration as legitimate and choosing to declare Harris as the real POTUS.
The mere existence of a king does provide some check, because at the back of the mind of the “real” government is the question - if the king rebelled against us, would we win?
We can't really speculate what the US would be like as a constitutional monarchy, as it's just very culturally anti-monarchic. The Second Amendment and free speech, for example.
In a monarchy, laws often restrict people from insulting the monarch. Not in UK, I believe, but even British culture pays their respects to the king. As a result, the king's words hold a lot of power. A president can "talk down" to congress, but a PM is still a servant of the king.
Let's say someone like Sir Richard Branson decides to do a Trump. If he claimed that he had to do X for the security of the nation, the king would be able to call him out on it. As head of military, the king has access to all the confidential data. The Supreme Court and Congress may be missing data. As the PM has to get the king to rubber stamp military actions, the king still has the right to veto it.
In case this isn't a rhetorical question, the homicide rate in DC is such that it beats out all 50 states by a considerable amount[0]. (The most murderous state, Louisiana, is roughly half as murderous as DC.)
There were over 5000 auto thefts reported last year[1] in an area that has about 350k registered cars. Statistically speaking, more than one in a hundred cars were stolen in one year!
Similarly, there were roughly 26k cases of property crime reported for an overall rate of property crime victimization of 3-4% of the population.
If I lived in DC, my day-to-day life would be affected a whole lot more by this level of disorder than a political event that took place on one day in one building. Of course, you're free to value things differently, but it's an indictment of how much antisocial behavior some Americans are willing to tolerate that people are shocked by the statement that "crime in DC is bad".
Though I guess the loop hole here is that the National Guard would in this case be acting under "state authority" given that typically state-like actions for DC are deferred to Congress. The open question being whether the Executive branch could act independently, or whether they still need explicit authorization from Congress.
"The Act does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor. The United States Coast Guard (under the Department of Homeland Security) is not covered by the Act either, primarily because although it is an armed service, it also has a maritime law enforcement mission."
It's confusing because DC does not have a governor so it looks like an edge case that has not been tested before.
the DC national guard is under the direct command of the president. The law may use the words "state" and "governor" but I'd take the other side of any bet that says that will be interpreted to mean that the president doesn't have the authority to deploy the DC guard in DC because of the posse comitatus act.
Suffice to say that before this morning I had only a vague idea about how legally complicated this could get. For instance, there's an opinion from the Department of Justice (albeit an old one) that concluded that the President can use the DC National Guard for law enforcement purposes (in that case, drug interdiction) without running afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act.
"One set of troops, the District of Columbia National Guard, has historically operated as the equivalent of a state militia (under Title 32 of the United States Code) not subject to Posse Comitatus Act restrictions, even though it is a federal entity under the command of the President and the Secretary of the Army."
Readit News
Aside from street protests and rallies (which NG should scrupulously facilitate for 1A reasons; DC itself has been fairly bad about this in the past, too), I don't think most local policing is highly political. Yes, DC residents are losing some democratic control over their local policing, which is bad, but DC has also done a bad job with local policing for a long time.
(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)
Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).
Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you think they've been "so bad for so long" then go spend some time in the city instead of watching TV.
Here, from the feds themselves (wonder how much longer this site will be live): https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
>Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)
I don't know how you could measure this, since DC saw a very significant reduction in crime last year without any interference from the National Guard. If there are further reductions this year, that would be a continuation of a trend, not a new phenomenon.
Beijing is the safest city I've ever lived in. A heavily policed city with an authoritarian government will give you all the safety and low crime rates you desire.
It comes at a cost. Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.
Alternatively, we could just make DC a state, which I'm broadly in favor of.
What are 10000 federal agents and soldiers going to do? Walk around looking for crime to stop? DC has the most police per capita of any city in America. How much crime do they stop by standing around? At best they respond to 911 calls and federal agents aren't plugged in to 911. What the hell are they going to do about crime that isn't in the streets? And are they going to do traffic enforcement because that's probably 99% of the unenforced crime in any city.
Weigh that against Pam Bondi stating in no uncertain terms that DC will be completely crime free in short order. This is pure theater.
Trump says crime in D.C. is out of control. Here’s what the data shows. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/10/trump-cri... - August 10th, 2025
Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low - https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-... - January 3rd, 2025 (My note: Published by this admin's DoJ in January of this year)
DC Metro Police 2025 Year-to-Date Crime Comparison - https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance
Counter-argument: things have not been bad. In DC or elsewhere. It's a meme. In fact DC crime statistics, like national ones, have been trending steadily downward for decades. They burp with immediate inputs, like spiking over the pandemic when formerly-employed folks found time to get in more trouble, but... they aren't bad.
DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe. All these places partisan media likes to paint as urban hellscapes are in fact historically safe cities in which to live and do business.
The answer to "why things have been so bad for so long" is inside your television, basically. It's not on the streets of DC.
Authoritarian intervention can lower crime at the expense of democratic rights. (Let’s not kid ourselves, the NG will not be used to “facilitate” protest in DC.). Effectively, an authoritarian response to crime further consolidates the power of the ruling class.
Trump has steadily encroached on constitutional rights throughout his term. He is indifferent to the root causes of crime. He is really only interested in crime insofar as it allows him to identify more people he doesn’t like as criminals, and to use harsher measures against them.
Every action taken by a police organization is per se a political action. That's why "police" are called that.
Troops in military uniforms patrolled the subway with rifles.
Nobody raised an eye and nobody in this thread apparently even remembers.
National Guard has deployed to Washington DC dozens of times already - many times to combat crime and disturbances. (Technically hundreds of times if you count inaugurations).
1) Threaten to lockup "homegrowns" in a foreign prison?
2) Arrest people for criticizing the war in Gaza?
3) Use the justice department to further a political agenda? (see Eric Adams case)
4) Revoke security clearances of law firms representing her opponents?
Yeah, keep pretending that these two actions are similar and this is just Democrats being hyperbolic again. Trump is using this as revenge against his political opponents since most in DC don't support him. The fact we're still pretending these two parties are the same is unbelievable.
March 2024 was a different world than the one we live in today, and if you haven't been following the news for the last 6 months then you are of course excused but if you have been following the news you know that already.
By my reckoning next stop would be an “accidental fire” in the House of Representatives.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leak-trumps-dc-deployment-...
ICE was the entity acting lawlessly, and tht were sent to support it.
>then they left without incident
They did not “leave withot incident”. Except in the sense that no additional incident was caused by their departure.
But, yes, the LA deployment was both a test and a warning sign (and, like the DC one, also a deliberate distraction from other things the Administration wanted to take a less prominent place in the national discussion at the time.)
In fact that’s actually what they’re doing:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-wash...
https://whyy.org/articles/30-years-ago-george-hw-bush-held-u...
Dead Comment
What if it helps clean up the homeless encampments and crime like Gavin Newsom did in San Francisco when Xi visited recently? That would be good!
D.C. is a dump and has been my entire life. There's been a drop in homicides since the peak in 2023, but last year was still 15% higher than in 2019: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/01/02/homicid.... In 2023, the homicide rate in D.C. was 39 per 100k people. This is only a little better than the civilian death rate in Iraq when it peaked in 2014 during ISIS (that was around 50 per 100k).
This is not a "guns" issue, it's a policing issue. Idaho has among the most guns of any state in the union, and Boise is as safe as a western European city, with 1/30th the homicide rate of D.C. Even several large U.S. cities, like Austin, El Paso, and Virginia Beach, have homicide rates 1/10th or less of D.C.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b....
D.C. is a rich city surrounded by wealthy suburbs. There's no reason for it to be as unsafe as decaying post-industrial cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore.
Calling it a "dump" is interesting, especially compared to some other cities that have much larger populations, budget, and representation. I've been in the DMV for nearly twenty years and much prefer living here than other metro areas because it is simply a lot cleaner and safer. Baltimore and Philadelphia are both cities that are much worse than living in DC proper.
Deleted Comment
Sadly, some of the malignant people around him are more cunning.
It’s hard to imagine three summers from now being anything other than a hellscape. I hope to God I’m wrong.
Trump is a symptom of the cancer of conservatism. He’s the inevitable result of conservative politics and positioning over the last 40+ years. The GOP wanted to make an environment where their guy could never be punished for watergate levels of blatant criminal offense and they fucking succeeded.
Dead Comment
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
They were? I didn't see them keeping the mob at bay, or protecting the Capital from being stormed, in the footage I saw. Do you have a link to said footage that you can provide?
Where was the NG when they were needed the most? And why?
Deleted Comment
https://www.usdebtclock.org/ is stil ticking along nicely.
Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police. In absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, there's no separation between the police and the army; soldiers are out there enforcing the law. In constitutional monarchies, you can't elect someone into Commander-in-Chief; the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.
I'm not saying it's a better system by any means - the US of A has seen plenty of wars and maybe it's best to have an elected Commander-in-Chief. But just some thought from a systems design standpoint.
A constitutional monarchy is what you get starting from an absolute monarchy and gradually draining the power out of it and transferring it to democratic institutions. It then satisfies the demand of the public who want the roleplay of an absolute ruler, and are scared of a fully egalitarian system, but without letting them actually do any absolutism.
King Charles does not have operational control of the military. He only has a large amount of personal loyalty, which is not quite the same thing. He holds a number of operational ranks from his service, from which he is retired, and a number of honorary senior titles.
The UK is just as vulnerable to troops-on-the-streets fascism as anywhere else. (Bloody Sunday etc)
The downside is of course, the monetary and social costs of having such an organ. But perhaps it's useful in the same sense the appendix is. When an illness catches the intestines, the appendix can best case be a reservoir of good and recolonize the intestines. Something like that happened in Spain.
That's not true in the case of European constitutional monarchies. The elected government has total power except for some very specific duties around the administration of government, like dissolving parliament. And even then, those are largely ceremonial.
I do think having so much power with one person who cannot easily be replaced at any point is bad for democratic government. In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant.
"In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant."
Though it feels like what we have now is poorly performing PMs replaced by another poorly performing PM. Often one that promises to do the opposite of what the previous PM did, then forgets the promises or blames them on something else.
To this day, bullet holes remain in the ceiling of the Spanish parliament building to remind them of the coup attempt. I can't find it anymore, but there was a good drama movie about these events on Netflix a while ago.
Bagehot divided the dignified and the efficient. I've long thought that one glaring downside of the American presidential system is that it tries to combine the two roles in one office.
This only works on paper, and on paper congress or SCOTUS would've stepped in much sooner.
In practice, the monarch either has a lot of power, or does whatever the real head of government wants. Especially with how Trump can claim that he has the mandate of the people given that he won the election, and it's not like he doesn't wrap his motives behind legitimate claims. It's pretty easy to just claim that he has to do X for the security of the nation.
In reality, if the US had a monarch, they too would've gone along with whatever Trump wanted because to not do so is the nuclear option. It would be the equivalent of states trying to secede or not recognizing the current administration as legitimate and choosing to declare Harris as the real POTUS.
In a monarchy, laws often restrict people from insulting the monarch. Not in UK, I believe, but even British culture pays their respects to the king. As a result, the king's words hold a lot of power. A president can "talk down" to congress, but a PM is still a servant of the king.
Let's say someone like Sir Richard Branson decides to do a Trump. If he claimed that he had to do X for the security of the nation, the king would be able to call him out on it. As head of military, the king has access to all the confidential data. The Supreme Court and Congress may be missing data. As the PM has to get the king to rubber stamp military actions, the king still has the right to veto it.
There were over 5000 auto thefts reported last year[1] in an area that has about 350k registered cars. Statistically speaking, more than one in a hundred cars were stolen in one year!
Similarly, there were roughly 26k cases of property crime reported for an overall rate of property crime victimization of 3-4% of the population.
If I lived in DC, my day-to-day life would be affected a whole lot more by this level of disorder than a political event that took place on one day in one building. Of course, you're free to value things differently, but it's an indictment of how much antisocial behavior some Americans are willing to tolerate that people are shocked by the statement that "crime in DC is bad".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intenti...
[1]: https://mpdc.dc.gov/dailycrime
AFAICT, from Peru's General Óscar Benavides:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_R._Benavides
https://cha.house.gov/2024/9/transcripts-show-president-trum...
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https://cha.house.gov/2024/9/transcripts-show-president-trum...
Though I guess the loop hole here is that the National Guard would in this case be acting under "state authority" given that typically state-like actions for DC are deferred to Congress. The open question being whether the Executive branch could act independently, or whether they still need explicit authorization from Congress.
"The Act does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor. The United States Coast Guard (under the Department of Homeland Security) is not covered by the Act either, primarily because although it is an armed service, it also has a maritime law enforcement mission."
It's confusing because DC does not have a governor so it looks like an edge case that has not been tested before.
Source: https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/use-national-guard-suppo...
Dead Comment