LA and Posse Comitatus

Joe Costello

Joe Costello

— 1 min read

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Back decades ago, only from obscure, mostly, though not totally, right wing civil liberties cranks would you ever hear anything about the Posse Comitatus Act. Today, it’s used by the State of California in Federal court against the President’s recent sending of federal troops onto the streets of Los Angeles. Hard to see or in any way want the President to have any standing here.

Posse Comitatus Act was originally passed in 1878. It was a deal northern Republicans made with southern Democrats to remove federal troops from the former rebel states. The act bars federal troops being used for local policing. It signaled the end of Reconstruction, insuring the recently manumitted slave population would remain both politically and economically disenfranchised for another century – a mistake this nation still pays dearly for daily. History is long.

In the 90s, Posse Comitatus made a brief appearance into the political limelight with Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh claimed he acted, in part, in response to the federal agents’, under the direction of America’s first woman Attorney General, Branch Davidian bloodfest in Waco, Texas. 80 people were killed, 27 children, all blood shed, as so much has always been, in the name of saving the children.

I remember thinking, Phew! if we’re going to start killing religious zealots in this country, well that’s just downright un-American. Hell, America owes its existence to religious zealotry.

In response, decorated, Gulf War veteran McVeigh more than doubled the death toll in Oklahoma City, including a lot more children. What was it Weil said about the fundamental uncontrollable nature of force unleashed? I remember the first reports from Oklahoma City, they cried, “Arabs, Muslims, maybe even Iranians!”

Me, I said, Oklahoma City? This was as home grown as an acre of corn and a truck full of fertilizer. So it was.

In my life, discussion of Posse Comitatus went from obscure and mostly right wing civil liberties rants, a brief raising to the limelight with McVeigh, and now the main legal argument of the bluest blue State of California against a President’s insertion of federal troops.

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