Restore the Militia

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

— U.S. Const. amend. II

Second Amendment Plank: Congress MUST Restore the Constitutional Militia of the Several States — and Forbid the Federal Government to Turn the National Guard Against the People

“RESTORE THE PEOPLES’ MILITIA!”

“The Framers left a free people four checks against a government that forgets its limits: the ballot, the courtroom, the jury — and, standing behind all three, the people themselves keeping and bearing their own arms in their own militia. While the first three have been worn thin. The fourth has been quietly dismantled — and its name pinned onto a federal force now being marched against citizens in their own streets. I am running to give the people back the fourth pillar of their own Constitution.”

— Michael R. Stoddard, C.P.A., C.F.P.

The Problem

The Constitution names a force that most Americans have never heard described accurately: the militia — the whole body of the armed people, enrolled in their own communities, officered from among themselves, and held ready for common defense. The Framers did not treat this as a quaint frontier custom. They treated it as a structural organ of free government: the citizenry’s own retained capacity to check a federal power that might one day exceed its limits. It stands behind the ballot, behind the courts, behind the jury — the last reserve of a free people, and the one the Framers most feared to lose.

That institution has been hollowed out. Over the course of a century — through the Dick Act of 1903, the National Defense Act of 1916, and the federal court decisions that followed — the militia of the several states was federalized, professionalized, and absorbed into a national reserve force. Its name was transferred to the National Guard. Today the original Constitutional militia survives almost entirely on paper. Federal law still defines nearly every able-bodied citizen as a member of “the unorganized militia” (10 U.S.C. § 246), but no state has enrolled, equipped, trained, or officered that body in living memory. Most Americans do not know they belong to it.

This is not a small omission. It is the quiet removal of one of the four pillars of American constitutionalism — and the absence weakens every other check that was built on the assumption it would still be standing.

The National Guard Is NOT the Militia!

The federal government will answer that the militia still exists — that it is the National Guard. This is the central confusion, and it must be corrected plainly.

The National Guard is a federal reserve of the United States Army and Air Force. It is organized under federal law, equipped with federal money, trained to federal standards, and — most importantly — callable into full federal service and deployable overseas without a state’s consent, as the Supreme Court confirmed in Perpich v. Department of Defense (1990). In every operational sense, it is a component of the standing national military.

The Constitutional militia is the opposite kind of institution. Under Article I, Section 8, Clauses 15 and 16, authority over the militia is divided: the states appoint the officers and conduct the training, while the federal government may call the militia into service only for three narrow, enumerated purposes — to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions. It is the body of the people, under their own states, structurally designed to be a check upon the standing army — not a part of it.

To call the National Guard “the militia” is to give the standing force the name of the very institution the militia was created to counterbalance. The shell has been kept; the substance has been replaced with its opposite.

The Crisis Has Arrived

For most of the last century this was a structural problem visible only to those who study the founding closely. In the last year it has become a live constitutional emergency.

In June 2025, for the first time in the nation’s history, a President invoked federal law to seize control of a state’s National Guard over the express objection of its governor — federalizing thousands of California’s troops and deploying them into domestic law-enforcement roles on the streets of Los Angeles. In August 2025, a federal court ruled that the deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 statute that codifies the Framers’ deepest fear: a national army used as a domestic police force. Similar seizures and deployments followed in other states, and the litigation reached the Supreme Court.

At the very same moment, from the opposite direction, states moved to disarm the body of the people from which any militia must be drawn. In May 2026, Virginia — whose own 1776 Declaration of Rights was one of the founding inscriptions of the right to bear arms — enacted a ban on the future sale, purchase, and manufacture of the most common semi-automatic rifles in America.

Both halves of the Framers’ design are now being violated at once. The federal government is wielding a federalized force against citizens in their own cities — precisely the danger the militia was meant to forestall — while states strip the people of the arms a militia presupposes. This is not an abstract grievance. It is the exact scenario the militia clauses and the Second Amendment were written to prevent, unfolding in real time.

The Proposal

I will introduce and support legislation to restore the constitutional architecture the Framers built, in three parts.

A. Recognize the State Militias as Distinct from the National Guard

Federal law should once again recognize the militia of the several states as an institution separate from, and not absorbed into, the National Guard — a body the states may organize, train, and officer under their own authority, as Article I contemplates. The unorganized militia already exists in statute; what is missing is a clear, protected channel by which the states can actually constitute and maintain it.

B. Restore the Constitutional Partition

Congress should repeal or amend the provisions of the National Defense Act and its successors that converted the militia function into a federal reserve, and should bar the deployment of federalized National Guard units in domestic law-enforcement roles except under the narrow, time-tested terms of the Insurrection Act. The federal government’s three enumerated purposes for calling forth the militia are not a suggestion. They are a limit, and they should be enforced as one.

C. Protect the Armed Body of the People

The right to keep and bear arms and the duty of common defense are not two separate things — they are two faces of one design. A people forbidden the ordinary arms of a citizen cannot constitute the militia the Constitution presupposes. Federal policy should defend the armed citizen against both federal overreach and state-level disarmament of the very body from which the militia is drawn.

Anticipated “Objections”

“This is a call for private militias and vigilantes.”

It is the opposite. The Constitutional militia is a lawful, organized, state-officered institution — accountable, trained, and called out only by lawful authority. Nothing in this proposal sanctions private armed action; it is precisely the lawful institution that makes private armed action unnecessary and illegitimate. The remedy for a broken public institution is to repair it, not to act outside it.

“The militia is obsolete in the age of a professional military.”

The militia was never meant to replace the army. It was meant to be the one thing a standing army, by its nature, can never be: the people’s own retained check against the misuse of that army. To call that obsolete is to declare the check unnecessary — which is exactly the assumption the events of the past year should have laid to rest.

“This is just a Second Amendment talking point.”

It is a structural argument, not a slogan. The Second Amendment protects one half of the design — the people’s arms. The militia clauses protect the other — the institution those arms exist to serve. A century of debate has fixated on the first and forgotten the second. Restoring the whole design is more conservative than the status quo, not less.

“By centering the militia, this ignores the individual right to keep and bear arms.”

It does the reverse — and the difference is the whole point. The reading behind this proposal makes the individual right primary, not derivative. The Amendment’s operative command is its last fourteen words — “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — and the militia clause is a preface stating why the right was written down, not a condition placed upon it: strike the militia clause and the right still stands whole; strike the right and no militia is possible. The right is grounded before and beneath the Constitution, in natural right and the common law; the document recognizes it rather than grants it, and nothing done to restore the militia can subtract from a right that never depended on the militia to exist. The real danger runs the other way: it is the militia-first readings — those that treat the right as a mere function of militia service — that revive the collective-rights theory Heller rejected, and that hand the disarmament movement its lever — for if the right flows from the institution, then where the institution lapses the right lapses with it. This proposal refuses that trap. It treats the armed citizen as the militia’s precondition — which is exactly why Part C defends the body of the people against disarmament from every direction. Far from ignoring the individual right, it restores the structural weight a century of narrow debate stripped from it, and defends it on both fronts at once.

“This is dangerous in today’s political climate.”

The danger is already here, and it is the status quo: a federalized force deployed against citizens with no lawful, locally controlled counterweight in existence. A restored state militia is not an escalation. It is the structural alternative that lowers the temptation to misuse the National Guard in the first place.

Conclusion

This is not a radical proposal. It is the most conservative position available: holding the federal government, and the states, to the design the Founders actually wrote. The radical position is the one we have drifted into — a militia hollowed to a name, a national force turned against citizens in their own streets, and a people being disarmed of the very capacity the Constitution assumes they will keep.

The Framers gave the American people four checks against a government that forgets its limits. Three of them — the vote, the courts, the jury — still function, however imperfectly. The fourth has been allowed to lapse. But a duty neglected is not a duty erased, and an institution abandoned is not an institution destroyed. The structure is still there in the Constitution, waiting to be restored.

I am asking you to help me restore your rights and duties:

“Restore the Peoples’ Militia!”

2A Mike