Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 8 2013

It took a 13-hour filibuster from Senator Rand Paul to wring this statement from Attorney General Eric Holder:

?It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: `Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?? The answer to that question is no.?

What Holder is saying, in substantive terms, is that the President does have the supposed authority to use a drone to kill an American who is engaged in ?combat,? whether here or abroad. Under the rules of engagement used by the Obama Regime in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, any ?military-age? male found within a targeted ?kill zone? is likewise designated a ?combatant,? albeit usually after the fact. That definition was broad enough to include 16-year-old US citizen Abdel al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike because his father was considered a combatant.

Holder selected a carefully qualified question in order to justify a narrowly tailored answer that reserves an expansive claim of executive power to authorize summary executions by the president. That?s how totalitarians operate.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.