'The Boston Marathon, we got to take a pass,' Kingston said. Kingston urged Guard to 'pass' on Marathon

A year ago, Rep. Jack Kingston was so concerned about the National Guard’s shriveling budget that he wanted it to “take a pass” on major events like “the Boston Marathon.”

The Georgia Republican pleaded with the guard’s leaders to skip participation at the annual race because state-based troops were stressed by the oncoming sequester budget cuts and the need to be in global hotspots like Afghanistan and Bosnia.


“The Boston Marathon, we got to take a pass,” Kingston said in March 2012, during a House Appropriations Committee hearing on the National Guard’s budget.

( PHOTOS: Boston Marathon explosion)

But Kingston had a different take on Tuesday as more than 1,000 National Guard troops from Massachusetts and small contingents from New York, New Hampshire and Rhode Island went to work helping Boston and federal officials with their investigation into the bombs that exploded Monday at the marathon’s finish line.

In an interview with POLITICO, Kingston, said he still had fiscal concerns about using National Guard troops at the Boston Marathon. But the 11-term congressman, who is now weighing a bid for an open Georgia Senate seat, said he was actually a bit more flexible on the idea of skipping the event entirely, explaining that that’s a decision best left for Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

( See also: Full coverage of the Boston Marathon explosions)

“Any time you’re spending military resources, you want to ask the question of what is the reason you’re putting the resources there? And if the Massachusetts governor determines he needs to do that, then that makes sense,” Kingston said in an interview.

More than 460 Massachusetts National Guard troops were on duty Monday at the Boston Marathon before the explosions, helping local police keep the race route clear. On Tuesday, that number ballooned to 1,000 guardsmen to assist with security, bomb disposal, communications and staging buses and helicopters. A small number of troops from Rhode Island, New Hampshire and New York also are working in Boston, or will be soon, according to National Guard Bureau spokeswoman Rose Richeson.

Kingston took issue with the National Guard’s deployment last year after hearing testimony from Lt. Gen. Harry Wyatt, director of the Air National Guard, who explained that national guard airmen spent some 500,000 workdays the previous year performing civil support missions while on active duty in their states. Wyatt listed as examples the inauguration of Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe, responding to floods and natural disasters and the Boston Marathon.

When his time for questioning the witnesses came during the March 2012 hearing, Kingston complained that the National Guard had too many requests for time and that some of the specific examples were among those that should be ignored. “Surely in this budget time when the governor of Arkansas calls for some — the National Guard to come to his inauguration, I just think we’ve got to take a pass,” Kingston said. “The Boston Marathon, we got to take a pass. Out of all those deployments, we got to take a pass.”

Craig McKinley, then-chief of the National Guard Bureau, replied during the hearing to Kingston that the deployments for the Boston Marathon and governor’s inauguration “were out of stately concerns” and didn’t get any federal funds. “They were paid for by the states that requested that particular support,” he said.

In the interview Tuesday, Kingston explained that his concern a year ago was more about out-of-state guardsmen getting pulled in to work at the marathon or inauguration from other states. “What I’d ask still is what would be the reason out-of-state guards would go to a marathon or an inauguration of a governor and is that a weighted reason that’s higher than sending them to Afghanistan or a flood or a disaster?” he said.

“Random acts of violence, which could happen at marathons…an Olympics or sports event or NASCAR races or whatever, they can happen everywhere,” Kingston added. “And I don’t know that putting the National Guard there would stop a bomb.”