Perpich v. Department of Defense

Perpich v. Department of Defense, 496 U.S. 334 (1990), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court concerning the Militia Clauses of Article I, Section 8, of the United States Constitution, in which the court held that Congress may authorize members of the National Guard to be ordered to active federal duty for purposes of training outside the United States without either the consent of the governor of the affected state or the declaration of a national emergency. The plaintiff was Rudy Perpich, governor of Minnesota at the time.

Perpich v. Department of Defense
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 27, 1990 Decided June 11, 1990
Full case name	Rudy Perpich, Governor of Minnesota, et al. v. Department of Defense, et al.
Citations	496 U.S. 334 (more) 110 S. Ct. 2418; 110 L. Ed. 2d 312; 1990 U.S. LEXIS 3012
Case history
Prior	666 F. Supp. 1319 (D. Minn. 1987), affirmed, 880 F.2d 11 (8th Cir. 1989); cert. granted, 493 U.S. 1017 (1990).
Holding
Article I's plain language, read as a whole, establishes that Congress may authorize members of the National Guard of the United States to be ordered to active federal duty for purposes of training outside the United States without either the consent of a state governor or the declaration of a national emergency.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy
Case opinion
Majority	Stevens, joined by unanimous
Laws applied
U.S. Const. Art. I § 8

In 1986, after governors George Deukmejian of California and Joseph E. Brennan of Maine refused to allow the deployment of their states' National Guard units to Central America for training, Congress passed the Montgomery Amendment, which prohibited state governors from withholding their consent. Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis had also challenged the law, but lost in U.S. District Court in Boston in 1988.

See also

• State defense force#Federal activation

Further reading

• Beckman, Norman (1991). "Limiting State Involvement in Foreign Policy: The Governors and the National Guard in Perpich v. Defense". Publius. 21 (3): 109–123. doi:10.2307/3330517. JSTOR 3330517.
• Bovarnick, Jeff (1991). "Perpich v. United States Department of Defense: Who's in Charge of the National Guard?". New England Law Review. 26: 453. ISSN 0028-4823.

External links

• Text of Perpich v. Department of Defense, 496 U.S. 334 (1990) is available from: CourtListener Google Scholar Justia Library of Congress Oyez (oral argument audio)