In a rambling and fact-challenged press conference on Tuesday, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi trotted out a long-discredited narrative that President Trump failed to deploy the National Guard on January 6 because he simply didn’t want to—while at the same time bizarrely accusing him of violating the Constitution by sending in the Guard elsewhere without gubernatorial permission.
Pelosi claimed, “The president has said he couldn’t, he can’t send in the Guard without the governor’s… permission.” She continued, “Section 12046 of Article X says that the… National Guard cannot be called up by the president without the consent of the governor.”
There is a major problem with this assertion and not just that there is no “Article 10” of the Constitution. Clearly she was confused because what she actually meant to refer to is 10 U.S. Code § 12406.
Be that as it may, under 10 U.S. Code § 12406, the president absolutely does have the authority to federalize the National Guard without a governor’s approval in cases of insurrection, domestic violence, or unlawful obstruction of federal law. The statute explicitly states that the president may call the Guard into federal service and that orders “shall be issued through the governors,” which is an administrative process, and not a requirement of consent. Federal law has long acknowledged the president’s right to federalize the National Guard, and the Supreme Court has affirmed the president’s right to federalize the National Guard without gubernatorial consent multiple times.
Despite these facts, Pelosi tried to rewrite both history and constitutional law: “That is the basis on which the governor of California is suing,” she said, suggesting that Trump had overstepped by deploying the Guard in California. Yet she also complained that on January 6, Trump supposedly refused to send the Guard—contradicting her own argument.
“In a bipartisan way, on January 6th… we begged the president of the United States to send in the National Guard,” Pelosi insisted. “He would not do it. Not only would he not do it, when law enforcement people were being harmed… he would not send it in.”
That claim also runs counter to the facts. As we previously reported, Trump had authorized the National Guard days before January 6—a timeline confirmed by former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund. It was Pelosi’s own Sergeant-at-Arms who, according to Sund, delayed and obstructed the Guard’s deployment due to “optics.”
Sund called Pelosi out on this lie Tuesday evening:
I think it’s time for Pelosi to lay off the sauce.
In one breath, Pelosi accused Trump of not sending in the Guard when it was needed. In the next, she slammed him for sending them in when it allegedly wasn’t—while falsely claiming he had no constitutional authority to do so. Her effort to blame Trump for both action and inaction reveals not only the weakness of the left’s January 6 narrative but also their increasingly desperate spin as legal facts continue to undercut their talking points.
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