Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds. - democracynow.org/2008/9/22/headlines#10

Why is a U.S. Army brigade being assigned to the “Homeland”? - Glenn Greenwald - Good overview of the situation, he amends it to be a bit less alarmist at the end. -

“There’s no need to start manufacturing all sorts of scare scenarios about Bush canceling elections or the imminent declaration of martial law or anything of that sort. None of that is going to happen with a single brigade and it’s unlikely in the extreme that they’d be announcing these deployments if they had activated any such plans. The point is that the deployment is a very dangerous precedent, quite possibly illegal, and a radical abandonment of an important democratic safeguard. As always with first steps of this sort, the danger lies in how the power can be abused in the future.”

Posse Comitatus Act - wiki

The Myth of Posse Comitatus - Major Craig T. Trebilcock, U.S. Army Reserve

HR5122 also known as the John Warner Defense Authorization Act was signed by the president on Oct 17, 2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. Section 1076 Text of Hr5122 is titled “Use of the Armed Forces in major public emergencies”. Removing the legalese from the text, and combining multiple sentences, it provides that: The President may employ the armed forces to restore public order in any State of the United States the President determines hinders the execution of laws or deprives people of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law or opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws. The actual text is on page 322-323 of the legislation. As of 2008, these changes were repealed, changing the text of the law back to the original 1807 wording, under Public Law 110-181 (H.R. 4986, Section 1068,) however in signing H.R. 4986 into law President Bush attached a signing statement which indicated that the Executive Branch did not feel bound by the changes enacted by the repeal. - wiki

The Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz in German) was passed by the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament) on March 23, 1933 and signed by President Paul von Hindenburg the same day. It was the second major step, after the Reichstag Fire Decree through which Adolf Hitler obtained plenary powers using legal means. The Act granted the Cabinet of Germany the authority to enact laws without the participation of the Reichstag for four years.

The formal name of the Enabling Act was Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich (”Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation”). - wiki