CONGRESS WEAKENS BUSH'S GRAB OF NATIONAL GUARD

STATELINE - Congress has approved legislation that would strip President Bush of the power to call up National Guard troops during terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other domestic emergencies, returning that authority exclusively to the nation's governors after little more than a year in the commander-in-chief's hands.

A little-noticed provision in last year's National Defense Authorization Act - an annual bill that lays out priorities and expenditures for the Defense Department - gave the president new power to go over governors' heads and activate National Guard troops during stateside crises ranging from hurricanes to health epidemics. The provision came in the form of an amendment to the 200-year-old Insurrection Act, which originally said the president could use the National Guard domestically only to put down rebellions or enforce constitutional rights if states failed to do so.

The 2008 Defense Authorization Act after being approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Dec. 12 - would repeal the president's expanded authority over the National Guard, leaving governors as sole commanders of the state-run militias during disasters on U.S. soil. The president maintains the right to deploy the Guard to foreign countries during wartime.

Bush is expected to approve the change as part of a much-broader $696 billion military package that includes a number of other key provisions sought by state officials across the country. . .

None of the changes, however, drew as much attention from all 50 governors as the provision renewing their exclusive authority over the National Guard during domestic disasters, such as this month's flooding in Oregon and Washington state and California's wildfires in October. All three states mobilized Guard units to help during those crises.

While President Bush has not used his new authority to call up state Guard units during the past year, governors from both parties have argued that states are always better poised than federal authorities to control Guard troops at home.

BUSH IS NOT the only one to seek unconstitutional powers over the National guard. Bill Clinton used the Guard for everything from Waco and Ruby Ridge to domestic law enforcement in the inner city. Clinton, who has rarely seen a civil liberty worth standing up for, even submitted legislation that would have virtually overturned the Posse Comitatus Act. His bill would have allowed the military to provide "technical assistance" to civilian law enforcement, a term Clinton himself defined as including "conducting searches, taking evidence and disarming and disabling individuals." So awful was this measure that even Casper Weinberger and Sam Nunn objected. As the director of the Florida ACLU, Robbyn E. Blumner, wrote in the St Petersburg Times: "Throughout history and around the world, involvement by the armed forces in civilian law enforcement is one of the trademarks of a repressive regime. Yet the administration's proposals would chip away at the wall that separates the two and, by that action, greatly enhance the power of the presidency. In the wrong hands, the results could be devastating to freedom."

A decade earlier Ronald Reagan illegally sent the National Guard to Honduras to help in the war against the Sandanistas. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis went to the Supreme Court in a futile effort to stop it but Clinton is happy to oblige, even sending his own security chief, Buddy Young, along to keep an eye on things. Winding up its tour, the Arkansas Guard declares large quantities of its weapons "excess" and left them behind for the Contras.