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The National Guard will put an end next midnight to a little more than four months of deployment at the nation’s Capitol, which began on January 6th.
“It’s been a long haul since January 2021, but next midnight there will be no National Guard members on Capitol Hill,” Brig. Gen. John Driscoll, commander of the National Guard task force on Capitol Hill, told local media.
The bursting into the Capitol of hundreds of supporters of former President Trump when a joint session of the two chambers was being held to ratify the victory of Joe Biden in the presidential elections in November motivated the deployment of this military corps in the reserve.
As of January 20, when Biden was inaugurated as president, there were more than 25,000 members of the National Guard from different parts of the country protecting the Capitol, according to Driscoll’s data.
Their numbers have been declining since then, and currently only 2,000 troops remain. As of next midnight, there will be none.
In recent months, security measures at the Capitol have been the subject of controversy among legislators. Republicans have criticized the measure arguing the enormous public expense after the mobilization of the troops, in addition to the terrible conditions in which the soldiers were for a time, who were forced to sleep in parking lots and inhumane conditions.
The U.S. House of Representatives, with its Democratic majority, approved last Thursday a spending package of 1.9 billion dollars to increase Capitol security, which is unlikely to prosper in the Senate.
Republicans argue that this is a political maneuver by the Democrats to keep the population on edge, since the seat of Congress has not suffered any altercations since January 6th.
