President Trump said on Tuesday that in addition to the airstrikes on Venezuelan boats suspected of trafficking drugs to the United States, the U.S. military would begin hitting targets on land. Not only are all these strikes unconstitutional by any construction, but they are also unprovoked acts of war against a country that poses no threat to the United States.
Since September, the administration has carried out at least twenty-one attacks on civilian vessels in the Caribbean, resulting in eighty-three deaths. Not one of those killed by American forces was charged with a crime in any court, much less convicted at trial. This behavior wouldn’t pass muster under Magna Carta, written by barbarians by our standards today, much less the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
This doesn’t require any fanciful 20th-century reading of the Bill of Rights, like the one that produced Roe v. Wade. That this is impermissible is firmly rooted in constitutional interpretation dating to the man who wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights himself.
There were several reasons for the War of 1812, not all of them legitimate. A certain faction among the war hawks of the day just wanted to steal Canada from the British empire. But foremost among the legitimate grievances cited by James Madison in asking Congress for a declaration of war, and frankly the only one most people remember, was the impressment of sailors on American ships into service in the British Navy.
It is important to understand the complaint was not against returning true deserters from the British Navy to Great Britain. As Madison said in his address, “And that no proof might be wanting of their conciliatory dispositions, and no pretext left for a continuance of the practice, the British Government was formally assured of the readiness of the United States to enter into arrangements, such as could not be rejected, if the recovery of British subjects were real and sole object.”
The problem the Madison administration had was that, in addition to disrespectfully boarding American ships by force, the British “so far from affecting British subjects alone, that under the pretext of searching for these, thousands of American Citizens, under the safeguard of public law, and of their national flag, have been torn from their country and from everything dear to them.”
That’s the whole point of due process. The government not only has to prove a crime was committed, but that they have indeed arrested the right person, which they frequently haven’t. This is why the mobbish retort, “narco-terrorists don’t deserve due process” is so counterintuitive. Without it, we don’t even know if the government has arrested the person they believe they have, much less whether this person committed a crime.
The founders risked surrendering their independence from Great Britain over this principle. Now, Trump supporters dismiss it with the wave of a hand.
This is not the only time when due process loomed large in a national issue. Nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by northern states was firmly rooted in the same principle. Like the impressment issue, the northern states did not deny the constitutionality of returning escaped slaves to their masters. They objected to alleged escaped slaves being summarily seized without due process.
First, you must prove John Doe was a slave who escaped, and also that this is indeed John Doe and not someone you’ve mistaken for him – which, again, the government does all the time to this day.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has cited statistics on this in opposing the administration from a letter written to him by the Acting Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) indicating that 21% of all ships boarded by USCG between September 2024 and October 2025 contained no drugs.
All were boarded because the government thought they were carrying drugs, but one out of every five were not. On what basis are we to believe a similar percentage of those summarily blown to bits on Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s orders weren’t similarly innocent?
As with many of Trump’s abuses, there is precedent to which he can point. Thirteen years ago, President Obama killed an American citizen he unilaterally deemed a terrorist without a trial or any formal charges. He made the ridiculous claim he had satisfied the Fifth Amendment’s due process requirements by a panel of his own self-appointed czars and cronies reviewing the case. But judicial power is delegated exclusively to the judicial branch in the Constitution.
Obama admitted to having a whole list of people he reserved the right to kill at his sole discretion, which his 2012 opponent Mitt Romney fully endorsed.
While no less unconstitutional or un-American, Obama’s crime was at least committed against someone he claimed had incited murder of American citizens. This made him a terrorist, by presidential pronouncement, and therefore subject to extrajudicial homicide as part of the Orwellian “War on Terror.”
The Venezuelans vaporized by the Trump administration, aren’t accused of blowing up, shooting, stabbing, or otherwise committing violence against Americans. They are called terrorists for selling willing American buyers drugs. Yes, the drugs are illegal in the United States, but there is no drug law prescribing the death penalty for violating it, much less without a trial or even a formal charge.
As with most of the other enormities committed by the U.S. government during this century, this one is easy to dismiss because it happens in some other country, to a foreign people most Americans know nothing about. Imagine if Americans walking on the sidewalks of American cities and towns saw people vaporized before their eyes by government drones without any attempt to arrest them or even verify their identity. No American would stand for it.
But what the Trump administration is doing now is even worse because it adds to trampling American liberty the crime of committing acts of war against a nation we are not at war with, which has not attacked us. The United States declared war on Great Britain on precisely the same principle, for acts less egregious than those being committed by the U.S. government against Venezuela.
The United States was once rightly considered an inspiration to the entire world. The “land of the free” achieved a society where the inalienable rights of the individual were more sacred and more protected than in any society in history. Today, it stumbles around the world stage like a drunk, shouting accusations in every direction, mumbling slurred pronouncements about “democracy,” and beating up on weaklings, while the world stands by and waits for it to pass out.
Will we ever sober up?
Reprinted with permission from Tom Mullen Talks Freedom.
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