I don't anything about this guy...
I heard about here at FR and looked it up.
Too bad the Dems and CNN are a of Posse Fullofdumbass.
I will masticate on the Posse Commitatus idea.
FYI...
The Posse Comitatus Act
I understand LTG Russell L. Honore is in overall command of the relief effort and he technically reports to FEMA/HSD.
The act doesn't apply.
Time to allow a temporary "Presidental waiver" of this law in a time of crisis as we are seeing this week, when the local and state-level officials are too incompetent to handle the situation. The regular military could have jumped into NOLA with several batallions and provided immediate security and relief.
Two things:
I guess we had no rights before 1878. Of course we did. So why was it passed in 1878?
I believe there was a very close election round about that time, a Presidential election.
Back in 1876, the Civil War had been over for only eleven years. Black men had finally won the right to vote, but Southern whites were vigorously attempting to regain their power over their state legislatures.
The presidential election of 1876 was perhaps the most disputed presidential election in American history.
Deep sectional antagonisms still divided the nation, with the industrial and commercial North mostly supporting Republicans, and the White South supporting the Democrats. The Republican presidential candidate in 1876 was Rutherford B. Hayes, the governor of Ohio.
The Democratic challenger, Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York, was widely favored to defeat Hayes. In the general election in November 1876, Tilden appeared to be the victor. He carried the national popular vote by 300,000. In the Electoral College, Tilden won 184 votes, to only 165 votes for Hayes, with twenty disputed electoral votes hanging in the balance. If Tilden had received only one of the disputed electoral votes, he would have been declared the winner. Hayes needed to win all 20 disputed electoral votes to become president.
These 20 electoral votes were in dispute: in three states (Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina) each party reported its candidate had won the state, while in Oregon one elector was declared illegal (on account of being an "elected or appointed official") and replaced.
In Florida (4 votes), Louisiana (8) and South Carolina (7), official returns favored Tilden, but election results in each state were marked by fraud and threats of violence against Republican voters. The Republican-dominated state electoral commissions subsequently disallowed a sufficient number of Democratic votes to award their electoral votes to Hayes.
In Oregon meanwhile just a single elector was disputed. The statewide result clearly had favored Hayes, but the state's Democratic Governor (LaFayette Grover) claimed that that elector, just-former postmaster John Watts, was constitutionally ineligible to vote since he was an "elected or appointed official". Grover then substituted a Democratic elector in his place. The two Republican electors dismissed Grover's action and each reported three votes for Hayes, while the Democratic elector, C. A. Cronin, reported one vote for Tilden and two votes for Hayes. (Ultimately, all three of Oregon's votes were awarded to Hayes.)
Compounding the national crisis were widespread allegations of voter fraud, especially in Florida. There was evidence of ballot tampering, with hundreds of ballots being destroyed or never counted. The political stalemate over who would become president threatened to plunge the country into a second Civil War.
Facing a constitutional crisis the likes of which the nation had never seen, on January 29, 1877 the U.S. Congress passed a law forming a 15-member Electoral Commission to settle the result. Five members came from each house of the U.S. Congress, and they were joined by five members of the United States Supreme Court. William M. Evarts served as counsel for the Republican Party.
The majority party in each house received three of the five members, and the five Supreme Court justices were chosen as follows: two from each of the major parties and another judge selected by these four to cast the swing vote.
The justices first selected Justice David Davis, but he was elected to the Senate by Illinois' state legislature, forcing them to choose an alternate, Justice Joseph P. Bradley, who, although a Republican, was considered the most impartial remaining member of the court. This selection proved decisive however. Only several days prior to the date set for the presidential inauguration, a deal was reached between Republicans and Democrats...
Bradley joined the other seven Republican committee members in deciding the 20 disputed electoral votes, giving Hayes a 185-184 electoral vote victory.
The "Compromise" of the election of 1876 actually represented a kind of electoral coup d'etat. The Republican candidate Hayes was selected to become president. The Federal government pulled thousands of Union troops out of the South, where they had been stationed since the fall of the Confederacy more than a decade earlier. The Compromise stated that the principle of states' rights would determine the future legal and political status of African Americans. In the language of that era, the so-called "Negro Question" was to become a "Southern Question." The white South was given a free hand to set the parameters of black freedom.
The consequences of the Compromise of 1876-1877 were profound and long-lasting. A Civil Rights Act which had been passed by Congress in 1875 was repealed in 1883. Jim Crow segregation was soon institutionalized throughout the South. Hundreds of thousands of African American men were purged from voters rolls, or were denied the right to cast ballots by local police intimidation and literacy restrictions. White vigilante violence was widely employed to suppress the black community. The Supreme Court confirmed the racist principle of "separate but equal" with its legal decision Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. It would take nearly a century for black America to recover.
Posse Comitatus Act was part of the deal of pulling out Federal Troops from the south thus allowing Mr. Jim Crow to retake the South for many decades.
We didn't need the Posse Comitatus Act before the 1870s and we don't need it now.