TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Jacob Sullum on the Obama administration’s claim that they can legally kill U.S. citizens they deem a threat:

The problem is that to accept this position, you have to put complete trust in the competence, wisdom, and ethics of the president, his underlings, and their successors. You have to believe they are properly defining and inerrantly identifying people who pose an imminent (or quasi-imminent) threat to national security and eliminating that threat through the only feasible means, which involves blowing people up from a distance. If mere mortals deserved that kind of faith, we would not need a Fifth Amendment, or the rest of the Constitution.

It really isn’t relevant whether the people the president orders blown up by unmanned drones in regions we’re not even at war in are a threat or not. Few would argue that Anwar al-Awlaki was actually a swell guy who didn’t deserve what happened to him. (His 16 year-old son? Not so much, despite Robert Gibbs disturbing attempt to blame Awlaki for his son’s death, rather than, you know, the U.S. government, which murdered him.) If the police fired Hellfire missiles on a car carrying a dangerous murderer, after all, we wouldn’t shrug our shoulders and say “Well, he deserved it”—we’d be horrified that the police murdered someone.

President Obama, who derided the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and torture of suspected al Qaeda leaders, is leaving craters and burning wreckage where a U.S. citizen existed just milliseconds prior. What’s relevant is that he is carving out the power for himself (and future presidents) to be judge, jury and executioner for U.S. citizens, regardless of where they are. The Obama administration claims that the Fifth Amendment isn’t violated because the executive branch’s decision process constitutes due process.

As Sullum argues, this wholly undermines the bedrock idea that government’s power must be restrained to protect the rights of individuals. If the president can unilaterally decide that U.S. citizens should be killed, why shouldn’t the federal government be able to make speech they find threatening to U.S. security or otherwise harmful illegal? Certainly that’s much less egregious than blowing someone up, so if we are to rely on the president’s wisdom in the case of drone strikes, why not rely on the wisdom of Congress and the president for banning speech?

The ratchet of power continues.