Napolitano: Obama 'stealing' American lives

[Patricia M. McBride]

There is so much out there right now about the "drone" killings of American citizens, but Judge Napolitano has weighed in with his opinion (which is highly regarded).

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2/6/2013

Judge blasts White House orders to assassinate U.S.  citizens

President Obama’s policy of targeting enemies, including Americans, for death  through drone strikes is the latest and most alarming example of the endless  expansion of government power, according to Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Napolitano is the senior judicial analyst for the Fox News Channel and is the  author most recently of “Theodore and Woodrow” and “The Freedom Answer Book.” He  says the growth in government power is nothing new, and the erosion of  individual freedoms is always pitched in pleasant ways.

“Monster government almost always comes with a smiling face,” he said. “After  it’s here, the face loses its smile and it saps our liberties and our  prosperity.”

Read  Andrew Napolitano’s hot new column, “Obama gives himself permission to kill,” in  which he asks: When will president’s drone murders come home to our  shores?

Napolitano said there is no implosion of rights as troubling as what we’re  seeing this week as the Obama administration defends the targeting and killing  of enemies, including American citizens, without giving them the right to due  process.

“I’ve often commented that my job here at Fox is to monitor the government as  it steals your liberty and steals your property, but I never thought I’d be  monitoring the government stealing your life,” he said. “Essentially, that’s  what this is.”

The administration’s legal justification for the drone program was laid out  in a Department of Justice “white paper” that made its way to NBC News on Sunday  night. The paper, which is a distillation of countless other reports, clearly  lays out what the Obama administration considers justification for the program  of targeted kills.

“It basically says that the president of the United States can authorize an ‘informed, high-level official of the U.S. government’ to strip the  constitutional protections of an American in a foreign country if the informed  official is satisfied that the American is an imminent danger to American  national security and his capture or arrest would be impractical,” Napolitano  said. “That is basically the power claimed by kings and tyrants. I can suspend  the law to get you if you are a danger.”

There are defenders of the Obama drone policy on both sides of the aisle, but  Napolitano said their arguments fly in the face of the principles on which  America was founded.

“Would we live in a safer society if the government could cut down every law  and abrogate every freedom and break down every door and arrest everybody it  wanted?,” asked Napolitano. “We’d be safe from the bad guys, but we wouldn’t be  safe from the government. Who would want to live in such a society?”

The judge said it’s very easy to read the administration’s legal defense for  the drone program and see how it could be used to target any American.

“The language in this 16-page document could easily apply to Americans in  America,” said Napolitano. “So the president could decide that Bill O’Reilly or  Glenn Beck or Judge Napolitano are just too troublesome, too meddlesome, too  much of an obstacle to the accomplishment of his purposes, and it’s time to take  them out.

“The core of the argument is ‘trust us.’  That’s an argument that the  Supreme Court rejected because it doesn’t trust a single individual to kill,” he  said, noting the Constitution gives Congress the authority to declare war and a  12-person jury the power to sentence someone to death.

As outlined in “Theodore and Woodrow,” Napolitano said Presidents Theodore  Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are largely responsible for changing America from a  nation championing limited government to one saddled with a government growing  beyond anyone’s ability to control it.

“(They) shared the same view and that was this: the Constitution is not the  supreme law of the land. It does not limit the government to the powers that  have been delegated to it. Rather it unleashes the government to do whatever it  wants except that which is expressly prohibited in the document,” said  Napolitano. “Now that is not just an academic argument because that is turning  the concept of limited government on its head.

“Every president from George Washington to William McKinley, Roosevelt’s predecessor, with the exception of Lincoln during the Civil War, accepted the idea that the federal government is one of limited powers and it can only do what the Constitution authorizes it to do,” he said. “When Roosevelt and Wilson switched to that (and) turned it on its head, they changed radically the size and scope of the federal government and the relationship of the federal government to individual Americans.”

So what did this big government push look like a century ago?

“In about a five-year period we suddenly got an income tax which they  promised would never be more than three percent. Of course, it went up to 90  percent in World War II,” said Napolitano. “We got the Federal Reserve, which  allows them to print worthless cash and put that into the economy. We got one of  the most useless wars in American history which is World War I, basically an  argument among the old, dying European monarchies about boundary lines.”

The judge says both Roosevelt and Wilson cracked down on free speech they  found unhelpful to their cause and both were outspoken racists who worked to  segregate the military after it had been integrated during Reconstruction.

Now that America has a full century of big government policies coming out of  Washington, can this trend be reversed and how could that happen?   Napolitano said it won’t happen anytime soon but will eventually happen but in a  most unpleasant way.

“I’ve argued on Fox and elsewhere that we don;t have two political parties  anymore.  We have one political party, the big government party.  It  has a Republican wing that likes war and deficits and corporate welfare.   It has a Democratic wing that likes war and taxes and individual welfare.   Both wings have a single goal and that is staying in power.

“Honestly, it would take half the Congress and the White House with a small  government, maximum individual liberty, Ron Paul-like mentality for these  changes to come about,” he said.

“If they don’t come about peacefully, they’ll probably come about by other  means. Sooner or later the federal government is going to run out of money, and  so many people will be dependent upon the federal cash which will stop coming  that they will all kinds of horrific things in order to eat and to live,” Napolitano said.  “At this point, there probably will be a revolution which  will end up in a small government or many small governments or a totalitarian  and then the totalitarian will probably be overthrown.

“I’m not suggesting this is going to happen tomorrow. I’m not saying I want  it to happen. I’m just a student and teacher of history suggesting that is the  natural result of government overextending itself,” he said. “It’s how Rome  died. It’s how the European socialist states are dying, and we’re not far  behind.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/napolitano-obama-stealing-american-lives...