Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Wednesday it’s time for tens of thousands of National Guard troops protecting the Capitol to go home.
In commentary for Fox News, the conservative senator declared 26,000 Guard members “answered the call at a critical time but its mission is now complete.”
“The National Guard has already announced plans to return almost 15,000 soldiers this week, with approximately 7,000 remaining on duty till this weekend,” he wrote. “Yet apparently several thousand will remain.”
According to Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, there’s “no specific, credible threat reporting — as distinguished from aspirational, uncoordinated bluster on the internet — that justifies this continued troop presence.”
“The lesson of the Capitol riot is not that we should quarter a standing army at the Capitol just in case, but rather that our security measures should be calibrated to the actual threats,” he wrote.
Cotton charged that in the wake of the deadly siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Capitol Hill security overreacted, “egged on by excitable cable news pundits and Democratic partisans eager to portray President Donald Trump’s 74 million voters as ‘domestic terrorists.’”
“Virtually overnight, the Capitol and National Mall transformed into a so-called ‘Green Zone’ protected by no-scale fencing, razor wire, and 26,000 soldiers.”
He called the measure “disproportionate even if another violent mob had in fact attempted to disrupt the inauguration.”
Now, he insisted, “with the inauguration behind us, the Capitol should return to normalcy,” adding local law enforcement agencies will still be able to “draw upon the approximately 17,000 soldiers of the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia National Guards” if there was any security threat.
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