On Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:52:38 -0700, Don Homuth wrote:

The National Guard is a select militia - while it is certainly a part of
the militia, it is not all of the militia. The "unorganized militia" of
10USC311 is also a part of the militia, as are the various state
organizations. (22 states maintain their own militia units not
affiliated with the National Guard, variously called the State Guard, the
State Militia, or the Home Guard.)

If the National Guard truly were the only militia organization, we would
have a Constitutional problem, because SCOTUS ruled in Perpich v. DOD
that the federal government may call up a National Guard unit for
overseas training in peacetime, and the Constitution gives the feds the
authority to call up the militia only for domestic purposes - to repel
invasion, suppress insurrection, and to execute the laws of the Union.

SCOTUS allowed this precisely because the Dick Act did _not_ make the
National Guard the entirety of the militia, or even of the organized
militia, and said that so long as federal law allowed states to provide
and maintain their own defense forces independent of the National Guard,
that could not be called up except within the limits of Article I, the
Dick Act did not deprive the states of their independent militias.

(And, BTW, the militia of the 2nd amendment is most clearly _not_ the
National Guard, or the various State Guards, or any other select
militia. The language very clearly refers to the general militia - the
armed body of the populace.)