“Trump conflates cocaine, which is produced mainly in Colombia and is often transported by sea, with fentanyl, which is produced in Mexico and overwhelmingly enters the United States in small packages by land over the southern border. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl accounts for nearly 70 percent of drug-related deaths in the United States.
The National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics says two milligrams of fentanyl is a potentially lethal dose. Trump therefore seems to be assuming that each of the boats destroyed on his orders was carrying 50 grams of fentanyl. That is pretty large for a fentanyl shipment: Between 2018 and 2023, according to a recent study, most fentanyl powder seizures weighed less than 40 grams. Even so, 50 grams (less than two ounces) is not large enough that you would see “fentanyl all over the ocean” after blowing up a boat carrying it, which underlines the point that Trump’s fentanyl is imaginary.
Even if we join Trump in pretending that cocaine is fentanyl, his claim relies on two other fallacious assumptions. If those 50 grams of fanciful fentanyl had not been intercepted, he implicitly posits, they would have been delivered to 25,000 different American consumers, each of whom would have consumed his share in a single sitting, with fatal results. Trump also imagines, contrary to more than a century of experience with drug interdiction, that traffickers do not compensate for intercepted shipments by sending more. When drugs are seized or destroyed, he seems to think, the total supply available to Americans is reduced by that amount. If that were true, it would be hard to understand why Trump says drug interdiction is “totally ineffective.”
Leaving aside these inconvenient details, Trump’s account of what he is accomplishing by ordering the deaths of suspected smugglers, like Bondi’s estimate of lives saved by less lethal anti-drug efforts that Trump now concedes were “totally ineffective,” is impossible on its face. Last year, the CDC estimates, illegal drug use resulted in about 82,000 U.S. “overdose deaths.” By Trump’s account, he has somehow prevented more than four times as many drug-related fatalities by destroying a tiny portion of the total supply.
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Trump is trying to justify murder as self-defense, obscuring the immorality and lawlessness of his bloodthirsty anti-drug tactics. Trump’s unprecedented policy of killing suspected drug smugglers instead of arresting them—which has already become the new normal—simultaneously corrupts the mission of the armed forces, erasing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, and undermines long-standing principles of criminal justice, imposing the death penalty without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process. But he hopes his extravagant claims about hypothetical deaths prevented by intercepting imaginary fentanyl will distract the public from the actual deaths he is ordering.”
Multiple high level military men have stepped down as the Trump administration appears to murder suspected drug traffickers. The administration showed their intel justifying the strikes only to some Republican Congressmen rather than to members of both parties, so Congress as a whole can’t even analyze the justifications.
“Somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, a speedboat with 11 people on board is blown to smithereens. Vice President J.D. Vance announces that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”
When challenged that killing citizens without due process is a war crime, the vice president responded that he “didn’t give a shit.”
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But over 20,000 people are murdered in the U.S. each year, and yet somehow we find a way to a dispassionate dispensation of justice that includes legal representation for the accused and jury trial.
Why? Because sometimes the accused is actually not guilty.
As passions subside, a civilized people should ask: To be clear, the people bombed to smithereens were guilty, right?
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The administration has maintained that the people blown to smithereens were members of Tren de Aragua and therefore narcoterrorists.
Certainly, then, if we know they belong to a particular gang, then someone must surely have known their names before they were blown to smithereens?
At the very least, the government should explain how the gang came to be labelled as terrorists. U.S. law defines a terrorist as someone who uses “premeditated, politically motivated violence…against non-combatants.” Since the U.S. policy is now to blow people to smithereens if they are suspected of being in a terrorist gang, then maybe someone could take the time to explain the evidence of their terrorism?
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Few independent legal scholars argue the strikes are legal. Even John Yoo—a former deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, who infamously authored the Bush administration’s legal justification for “enhanced interrogation techniques”—has criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the strikes, saying: “There has to be a line between crime and war. We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.””
“Every American who is concerned about the state of our liberties ought to find harrowing President Donald Trump’s recent declaration that the National Guard is now in place in Portland, Oregon. As he wrote on social media, the goal is to restore law and order as “conditions continue to deteriorate into lawless mayhem.”
There are some protests against ICE’s increasingly abusive raids and detentions, but this is nothing more than a pretext to exert federal control over cities. I’m in Portland regularly, and it’s one of the nation’s most placid and safest big cities. Protests have at times been unruly over the years, but are well within the ability of local police to control.
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We should all be fearful when politicians exaggerate problems to grab more power. And it’s not just Portland. Trump previously deployed National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles and is threatening to do so in Chicago and Memphis. The president’s declared reason—to tamp down on protests—should raise the hair on everyone’s neck. He also suggested federal troops would target crime problems.
In his speech to the nation’s generals, Trump said, “We should use some of the dangerous cities as training grounds” for military intervention, as he prattled about a “war from within.” That’s authoritarian bluster of the sort heard in despotisms. Note the support or eerie silence from limited-government, constitutional conservatives who spent years warning us about government oppression.”
“When conservatives reject constitutional limits on executive power and foment civil conflict, what exactly are they conserving?
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“There was a time when the American right was conservative: appreciative of inherited wisdom, skeptical of rationalism, wary of excessive government power, and against radical change.
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The New Right is not interested in defending these distinctively American ideals. Drawing instead on collectivist, nationalist, and even monarchist traditions from continental Europe, this New Right seeks to wield the tools of government to advance its own social, cultural, and religious priorities. For years, the New Right, by its own admission, has rejected the tenets of classical liberalism, including individual liberty, mutual toleration, and limited government.
“Over the last eight months, the Trump administration has run roughshod over Congress and its constitutional prerogatives. Trump’s decision to ignore the TikTok ban on his first day in office may seem minor in the grand scheme of things, but it foreshadowed a series of far more aggressive moves to usurp much of lawmakers’ constitutional authority: dismantling congressionally-created agencies, redirecting congressionally appropriated funds and implementing a massive tax hike on the American public in the form of Trump’s chaotic tariff regime.
The vast majority of this was made possible by congressional Republicans, who have largely turned a blind eye to all of Trump’s gambits, and by the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, who have handed Trump a series of victories this year in his wide-ranging efforts to both unilaterally slash the federal government while dramatically expanding the powers of the presidency.
The acquiescence to Trump’s TikTok reprieve this year has been a far more bipartisan affair, but it has been a constitutional farce all the same, and it is not over yet.”
Why have a Congress if the president can just ignore its laws? Why have a Constitution if the president can just ignore it? The power to spend is clearly given to Congress. The President is supposed to execute that spending. This is the president refusing to faithfully execute those laws, clearly violating the division of powers spelled out in the Constitution.
“The Supreme Court on Friday extended an order that allows President Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5 billion in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.
With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court’s conservative majority granted the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.
The Justice Department sought the high court’s intervention after U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.”
“Her key example of this alleged judicial malfeasance is the case of Lochner v. New York (1905), in which the Supreme Court struck down a state economic regulation on the grounds that it violated the right to economic liberty that was secured by the Fourteenth Amendment. “Courts owe deference to legislative majorities in determining how to handle economic and social problems,” Barrett writes in opposition to Lochner. The Supreme Court “must not infringe on the democratic process by entrenching issues that the Constitution leaves open.”
Barrett thus favorably invokes, and cites, the Lochner dissent written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who thought the Supreme Court had no business second-guessing the decisions of state regulators and should instead adopt a thoroughgoing posture of judicial deference.
For an originalist, the central question raised by Lochner is whether or not the Fourteenth Amendment, as originally understood, protects an unenumerated right to economic liberty.
According to the Holmes-Barrett view, the Fourteenth Amendment does not.
But the historical evidence says otherwise. According to the principal author of section one of the Fourteenth Amendment, Rep. John Bingham (R–Ohio), “the provisions of the Constitution guaranteeing rights, privileges, and immunities” include “the constitutional liberty…to work in an honest calling and contribute by your toil in some sort to the support of yourself, to the support of your fellow men, and to be secure in the enjoyment of the fruits of your toil.”
Furthermore, as I’ve previously noted, “even those who opposed the passage of the 14th Amendment agreed that it was designed to protect economic liberty from overreaching state regulation—indeed, that was a big reason why they opposed the amendment in the first place.” When both the friends and foes of a constitutional provision agree in real time about what it meant, their agreement counts as important historical evidence for the provision’s original public meaning. In this case, such evidence supports the position of the Lochner majority and undermines the position of the Lochner dissent.
Alas, Barrett’s book doesn’t mention any of this relevant historical material. Instead, she basically just echoes Holmes’s ahistorical dissent and leaves it at that.
That’s too bad. As Barrett herself put it, “interpreting the Constitution today require[s] us to understand its historical meaning.” Yet Barrett neglects to do that very thing in one of the main cases she invokes to support her position.”
“Whether he is waging the drug war, imposing tariffs, deporting alleged gang members, or fighting crime, the president thinks he can do “anything I want to do.””