We must seriously fear for our country when 41% of Democrats, the party of American liberals, believe that the president should be able to decide, on his own, whether to kill by drone strike an American citizen on U.S. soil merely because he's suspected of being a terrorist.
If we have fallen so far that such a large fraction of liberals would countenance such an extraordinary breach of constitutional rights as to kill an American who has not been charged, much less tried and convicted in a court of law, simply on the suspicion he might do us harm, then we are on the doorstep of tyranny. Would these Democrats have approved of the assassinations Bill Ayers or any of the other violent domestic terrorists of the sixties and seventies?
And what constitutes a terrorist? Nancy Pelosi said that the Tea Party consisted of terrorists. Do the liberals in the above cited poll think that it would be okay for Mr. Obama to attack the next Tea Party rally with hellfire missiles?
Nor are our fears that this administration sees itself as above the law allayed when the Attorney General of the United States refuses to answer a simple yes/no question as to whether he, and thus the president, think extra-judicial executions are constitutional. Attorney General Holder eventually says he doesn't think so, but only after repeated attempts to duck the question from Senator Ted Cruz:
Why can't he give a firm yes or no answer? Why is he resorting to obfuscation and sophistry? What's he trying to avoid saying? These are people who professed to be outraged that the Bush administration was holding foreign terrorists at Guantanamo Bay without a trial, but they evidently can't now bring themselves to unequivocally state that killing such people, even when they are American citizens and could be arrested and tried, would be wrong.
Yesterday Senator Rand Paul launched an old-style filibuster in the Senate in an attempt to elicit from President Obama a denial that he thinks it constitutional to kill on U.S. soil suspected terrorists who are U.S. citizens but who don't pose an imminent threat. As of last night the president hadn't replied.
It's astonishing that Rand's colleagues on the other side of the aisle, men and women who've portrayed themselves for decades as staunch civil libertarians, defenders of the rights of all citizens, have all fled for the tall grass (with the honorable exception of Sen. Ron Wyden) and have refused to join Senator Paul in his effort to establish that American citizens will not be denied their rights by this administration. Evidently, for these Democrats, political loyalty to party supercedes loyalty to the constitution and the American people.
When our political leaders seem so blithely indifferent to the constitution, when over 41% of the Democrats in the country are okay with the president unilaterally killing American citizens who are terrorist suspects, is it any wonder that gun stores are doing a booming business?