Martial Lawmen

"You are driving home, exhausted from work, lugging groceries and carrying your child in the back seat. Lights, police, and roadblocks await you. Your car is stopped, an armed officer comes over, and you must roll down your window. Your child begins crying. You must now prove to the police officer's satisfaction that you have the right to drive down your own block."

That scenario, as described by Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a constitutional-rights attorney, is not a vignette from Iraq or some banana republic. Versions of it have played out on numerous occasions in the District of Columbia, which this summer established a police cordon around the violence-prone Trinidad neighborhood. Individuals driving into the zone had to identify themselves and state their business. If a police officer deemed their reason for being there not "legitimate" enough, the driver was turned away.

The cordon was meant to reduce violence, but it didn't work. Crime during the period in which the checkpoints were in effect rose, says Verheyden-Hilliard, citing statistics the District itself filed in court documents related to a lawsuit over the checkpoints.

It is disturbing enough for a municipality to impose such restrictions on citizens who have presented not even an improbable cause for law-enforcement scrutiny -- let alone a probable cause. But now imagine a similar scenario in which the armed forces stopping American citizens at roadblocks were not civilian police officers, but military soldiers. Until a few years ago it would have been unthinkable. A few years from now it might be reality.

The Pentagon is gearing up to have 20,000 uniformed troops, divided into three rapid-reaction forces, trained to maintain order after a terrorist attack or other domestic disturbance. The first rapid-reaction force already is on call.

Using military forces for such domestic purposes "breaks the mold," says a homeland-security expert at the Army War College. It is "a fundamental change in military culture," according to an assistant secretary for homeland defense. It is also a dangerous step toward military mission creep that erodes the post-Civil War Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the use of the military for domestic peacekeeping. President Bush has twice asked for revisions to that law.

We understand and sympathize with concerns about maintaining order in the wake of a horrific domestic attack. We also remember that after 9/11, Americans did not run berserk. They rallied around flagpoles. Likewise, most of the tales of lawless mayhem in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck turned out, on closer examination, to be urban legends. In reality, many of the residents took up their personal firearms to defend their homes, their neighbors -- and the rule of law.

That is what the Founders envisioned when they passed the Militia Acts of 1792, which established citizen armies quite apart from the cadre of professional soldiers that now makes up today's standing armies. Many states still have similar militia acts. Virginia's, for instance, stipulates that "the militia of the Commonwealth of Virginia shall consist of all able-bodied citizens . . . who are at least sixteen years of age and, except as hereinafter provided, not more than fifty-five years of age. The militia shall be divided into four classes, the National Guard, which includes the Army National Guard and the Air National Guard, the Virginia State Defense Force, the naval militia, and the unorganized militia." (Emphasis added.)

America's professional armed forces are the greatest in the world at the job they are assigned to do: win wars. It is a bad idea to divert them from that crucial task. It is a particularly bad idea to divert them to a radically different task, such as acting like U.N. peacekeepers on American soil. The military's proper job is to keep foreign enemies at bay -- so that American civilians can govern themselves at home. That formula has worked well for more than 200 years, and there is no good reason to change it.