“I was deployed all over the world, and have trained other servicemembers on the line between military and civilian law enforcement,” Weninger said in a statement. “South Carolina’s National Guardsmen should not be asked to undertake illegal deployments, or be used to score political points by our government.”
A non-profit organization and Navy veteran are suing South Carolina over Gov. Henry McMaster’s decision to send National Guard units to Washington, D.C., last fall.
According to The Greenville News, Gov. McMaster authorized the deployment in August to comply with President Donald Trump’s request to send state-controlled military forces to the nation’s capital for the purpose of crime-prevention. The South Carolina Guard relieved a contingent from Georgia shortly after two soldiers from West Virginia were shot and killed.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs, the South Carolina Public Interest Foundation and Navy veteran James Weninger, claim that McMaster’s deployments—the first ordered in August, and the second in November—were inherently unlawful. More specifically, the lawsuit suggests that McMaster exceeded his authority under state law by agreeing to deploy the Guard at President Trump’s mere suggestion.
Weninger, who served in the U.S. Navy, said that deployments should never be motivated by a desire to “score political points.”
“I was deployed all over the world, and have trained other servicemembers on the line between military and civilian law enforcement,” Weninger said in a statement. “South Carolina’s National Guardsmen should not be asked to undertake illegal deployments, or be used to score political points by our government.”
Weninger and the South Carolina Public Interest Foundation are being represented in litigation by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and the non-profit organization Democracy Forward. In a separate statement, representatives for both groups agreed that soldiers should not be used as “pawns” in Trump’s attempts to exercise military control over American cities.
South Carolina has since responded to the allegations with the sort of politically-charged and performative rhetoric characteristic of the Trump administration and its allies.
Brandon Charoshak, a spokesperson for McMaster’s office, said in a statement that “the people of South Carolina have empowered their governors with unambiguous authority to utilize and deploy the state’s National Guard to save and protect American lives, defend the homeland, and assist in enforcing the rule of law. To suggest otherwise demonstrates either a remarkable ignorance of constitutional and statutory law, or a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
The lawsuit, in contrast, cites South Carolina code as evidence that McMaster simply doesn’t have the power that his office claims. Under state law, the National Guard is only to be deployed if certain conditions are met—and the plaintiffs say that high crime in Washington, D.C., doesn’t meet the standard.
“The South Carolina National Guard is a vital state resource, meant to serve residents of this State in times of emergency,” said Allen Chaney, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina. “Needlessly sending 300 servicemembers to D.C. over the objection of the District’s mayor is not only wrong, it’s unlawful.”
Sources
Gov. McMaster faces lawsuit over SC National Guard Deployment
Lawsuit challenges ‘Gov. McMaster’s unlawful deployment of S.C. National Guard’
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