Terror Tuesday Redux

No kings should mean no presidency. By Luke Pickrell

On Monday, the U.S. assassinated six more people traveling aboard two boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Since September 2, the U.S. has blown up 20 boats and killed 76 people. The government has justified the murders by citing a classified legal opinion produced by the Justice Department that argues the boats and their crew pose an imminent threat and are “enemy combatants” in an “armed conflict” with America. The United Nations and the United Kingdom say the strikes violate international law and amount to extrajudicial killing. But who cares?

Days earlier, the Senate voted down a measure requiring congressional approval for military action against Venezuela. The bipartisan resolution failed in a 49-51 vote that required a simple majority to pass. On any given day, the 47 Senate Democrats represent some 25 million more Americans than the 53 Senate Republicans. (Since the mainstream media acts like the Senate is normal, I had to crunch the numbers using ChatGPT.) Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined the Democrats in Thursday’s vote, so millions more Americans can be safely added to the difference. You get the point; the Senate isn’t based on proportional representation.

Wanton murder is not unique to the Trump Administration. “Successive presidents have now claimed the unilateral power to authorize secretive extrajudicial killing outside any recognized battlefield, with no meaningful accountability for wrongful deaths and civilians’ lives lost and injured,” read a letter sent to President Biden in 2021. The Obama administration held “Terror Tuesday” meetings, in which dossiers of targets picked for assassination outside warzones — called “baseball cards”—were reviewed and approved by high-level bureaucrats. Obama also oversaw the assassination without trial of two American citizens: Anwar Al-Aulaqi and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman Anwar Al-Aulaqi. “Not only does the administration claim to have sweeping power to target and kill U.S. citizens anywhere in the world, but it makes the extraordinary claim that the court has no role in reviewing that power or the legal standards that apply,” noted the ACLU in 2010.

And of course, the Bush administration, guided by the psychopathic Dick Cheney, launched the War on Terror and introduced terms like “enemy combatants,” “enhanced interrogation,” “extraordinary rendition,” and “warrantless wiretapping” into everyday parlance. (In case anyone thinks justice exists independent of mass working-class action, just remember that John Yoo makes hundreds of thousands of dollars teaching the next generation of lawyers at UC Berkeley.) The U.S. state — or more precisely, a single person: the sitting president — can kill anyone, at any place and time, with not only zero legal ramifications, but with the full backing of the Supreme Court.

By now, eradicating unidentified people using jets, gunships, and drones is standard practice. Trump’s “narcoterrorists” and Hegseth’s “Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere” are just new names for Biden’s “targets,” Obama’s “individuals who pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” Bush Jr.’s “unlawful belligerents,” Bush Sr.’s “drug traffickers,” etc.

Concerned onlookers talk about unchecked presidential powers, and the most visible resistance to the Trump administration has amassed under the slogan No Kings. But these protests are clearly directed at Trump alone, not at the imperial presidency as such. This is a mistake, and reveals a frustrating lack of historical memory for everything that was built up—much of it by Democratic Party administrations—before Trump came along.

Today, after decades of war and other foreign adventures, any person occupying the Oval Office—regardless of political party or personal disposition—obtains the keys to a well-oiled killing machine with infinite resources and total legal impunity. One can bemoan the fact that the presidency has become something beyond the Framers’ intentions, but that matters little. The Framers are dead, and the imperial presidency is our problem alone.

What’s to be done? In 1973, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed that the Constitution was founded, “for better or for worse, on an idea new to the world in the eighteenth century and still uncommon in the twentieth century — the idea of the separation of powers.” Half a century later, we can answer definitively: for worse. Presidential systems tend to concentrate power in the executive, and the United States is clearly no exception. Add in decades of unending war, a Supreme Court whose unelected members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the malapportioned Senate, and an unusable amending clause — and King Trump makes total sense.

The U.S. working class would be in a much better situation with a parliamentary system where power is concentrated in a single body elected by universal and equal suffrage and proportional representation. Think Sweden and not the UK, which elects MPs using the same undemocratic single-member, first-past-the-post system used in U.S. House elections. Unfortunately, there’s no way of amending the Constitution to reach our desired outcome. So, a popular assembly is in order — a democratic body tasked with writing a new founding document and dramatically reducing the possibility of political power solidifying in the hands of one person.