- Jay Janner/AP Photos
- A guy who thinks the military is going to overtake Texas
The recent order by the governor to the Texas State Guard to keep an eye on U.S. Army maneuvers in the vicinity should be contemplated by serious Chicagoans with a twinge of envy. Illinois doesn’t have a state guard. A pity.
So he pointed out “the ‘militia’ in colonial America consisted of a subset of ‘the people’—those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range.” The militia wasn’t something you signed up for; it was a a duty of citizenship. Whenever tyranny threatened, you would muster at arms—perhaps to serve the king (who at this point had become the president), perhaps to oppose him. As for “well regulated”—that didn’t mean under the jurisdiction of some higher authority. Scalia explained it “implies nothing more than the imposition of proper discipline and training.”
The fit may be a loose one, but surely the tighter the fit is between the first clause and the second when the amendment’s applied, the more likely the court will be to smile on the application. The Illinois National Guard, which consists of 13,000 volunteers, is almost completely sustained by federal dollars, and it can be federalized at a stroke of the president’s pen. It’s clearly not what Scalia believes the founding fathers had in mind when they spoke of a “well regulated militia.” Yet the Illinois Constitution, ratified in 1970, defines militia exactly as Scalia did. Says Article II, Section I, “The State militia consists of all able-bodied persons residing in the State except those exempted by law.”
