Senator Jim DeMint gave one of the most rousing speeches at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, warning Republicans that there can be no compromise with the Democrats. As usual, Sen. DeMint is right. Republicans cannot afford to compromise, quite literally, with any party or anyone who honestly believes that our government can spend one more cent or borrow one more dollar for one more minute.

But this also goes for Republicans.

We’ve heard a lot this week about the “Santorum surge” as the former Pennsylvania Senator rises in the polls to become the latest Republican to pose a serious challenge to Mitt Romney. Romney’s big government offenses are numerous and well known, which is why conservatives remain reluctant to support him. But Santorum’s big government offenses are just as numerous and equally as offensive. Writes The Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney:

As a member of Senate leadership, Santorum literally was an agent of the GOP establishment during passage of No Child Left Behind, the expansion of Medicare, and the overspending of the Bush era.

Red State’s Erick Erickson is even more explicit:

Rick Santorum is a pro-life statist. He is. You will have to deal with it. He is a big government conservative. Santorum is right on social issues, but has never let his love of social issues stand in the way of the creeping expansion of the welfare state. In fact, he has been complicit in the expansion of the welfare state.

The unavoidable dilemma concerning both Romney and Santorum is that neither man has ever been conservative in the same way that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan defined that term—believing that government isn’t the solution to our problems, but the problem. Reagan believed that conservatism proper was like a three-legged stool, consisting of social, national security and economic/libertarian conservatives. Both Romney and Santorum have never had much use for the fiscally responsible leg of that stool. Both candidates reveal this plainly in their attacks on each other—whether Santorum’s insistence that Romney is a TARP-supporting liberal who gave the Democrats the blueprint for ObamaCare, or Romney’s insistence that Santorum represents, as Carney put it, “an agent of the GOP establishment during… the overspending of the Bush era.”

Unfortunately for the GOP, both candidates are absolutely right in their indictments of each other. Romney and Santorum are essentially George W. Bush Republicans competing in a Tea Party-tinged election where conservatives do not necessarily want to go back to the big spending Bush era. Bush’s GOP was completely void of the economic/libertarian philosophy Reagan believed essential in promoting an effective conservatism, and the absence of any tangible limited government philosophy is what allowed Bush Republicans to rack up debt even worse than Bill Clinton Democrats. Said Sen. DeMint of the Bush era: “You could accuse Republicans of a lot of things, but you could never convict us of being too conservative!”

Sen. DeMint wants Reagan’s three-legged stool restored, advising the GOP that “The debate in the Republican Party needs to be between libertarians and conservatives… There’s no longer room for moderates and liberals because we don’t have any money to spend, so I don’t want to be debating with anyone who wants to grow government.”

Some Republicans now look to Romney, though most of his career he has grown government. Some Republicans now look to Santorum, though most of his career he has grown government. When President Obama promises to cut spending in every State of the Union address he’s delivered, conservatives instinctively know he’s lying. Why? Because Obama’s actual record of cutting spending is non-existent. The same is true of Romney and Santorum. To the extent that Republicans realize this, they’ve been reluctant to support either candidate. To the extent that Republicans have been willing to ignore it, they compromise conservative principles in the very way Sen. DeMint has warned them not to.

If DeMint wants the conversation in the GOP to be between libertarians and conservatives, Santorum says: “I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.” This is true. Santorum has fought against small government conservatism his entire career.

Sen. DeMint is right that Republicans can no longer afford to compromise with the Democrats. The remaining question is: Can conservatives afford to compromise with Republicans who grow government and spend money just like liberal Democrats?

That said, when Bill Clinton was conservatives’ main target, the most vicious criticisms focused on the president’s sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky. My problems with Clinton were primarily the same problems I would later have with George W. Bush and Barack Obama — big government, big spending, porous borders and unnecessary wars. But for virtually all conservatives and especially social conservatives, Clinton’s sex scandals were a rallying point during the late 1990s.

President George H.W. Bush’s drug czar, Bill Bennett, constantly hammered the notion that America was “defining deviancy down” by being too accepting of Clinton’s shenanigans, or as he wrote in 1998:

It is said that private character has virtually no impact on governing character; that what matters above all is a healthy economy; that moral authority is defined solely by how well a president deals with public policy matters; that America needs to become more European (read: more “sophisticated”) in its attitude toward sex; that lies about sex, even under oath, don’t really matter; that we shouldn’t be judgmental …

Bennett concluded:

If these arguments take root in American soil, if they become the coin of the public realm, we will have validated them, and we will come to rue the day we did. These arguments define us down; they assume a lower common denominator of behavior and leadership … we will have committed an unthinking act of moral and intellectual disarmament. In the realm of American ideals and the great tradition of public debate, the high ground will have been lost … In that sense, then, the arguments invoked by Bill Clinton and his defenders represent an assault on American ideals …

As noted, I’ve made a small career out of pointing out supposed conservative Republicans’ political deficiencies. This is often a thankless task. I’ve learned that if voters like a candidate’s personality or speaking ability — or really dislike the alternative candidate — they’re generally willing to forgive just about anything. For example, in 2009 and 2010 the tea party’s prime issues were opposing TARP and Obamacare. Now, most polling shows the tea party’s support is split primarily between two Republican presidential candidates who supported TARP and a government healthcare plan that Obama considers the blueprint for his own. In their zeal to defeat Obama, many Republicans don’t seem to mind electing a GOP version of him. Personality trumps policy; partisanship trumps principle.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new.

But what is new is what social conservatives are now willing to accept in their determination to defeat Obama. When a thrice-married Newt Gingrich, already an admitted adulterer, is accused by his second wife of asking for an open marriage — and this becomes a positive electoral advantage — the right has entered new and unchartered territory. Social conservatives were always the first to declare Clinton the “philanderer-in-chief.” Many of them now strongly support a known philanderer.

Read the entire column at The Daily Caller

The tea party originally stood for one simple but important message: Stop spending. For tea partiers, the “Troubled Asset Relief Program” or TARP was the litmus test and any Republican who supported it faced the wrath of the movement. Explained Utah tea party leader David Kirkham in May 2010:

I think it’s a matter of fiscal or financial responsibility … What the tea party people are about and the vote for TARP and the vote for the bailout was, in our opinion, pretty fiscally irresponsible, and that’s what’s raised the ire of most people.

At the time, Kirkham’s group was working to unseat Republican Senator Bob Bennett, who had voted for TARP. Kirkham’s efforts would eventually help elect tea party champion Sen. Mike Lee. When asked if the TARP-supporting incumbent deserved to lose his seat over just one vote, Kirkham replied:

That one vote was pretty toxic. That one vote affected a lot of things, changed the rules of the game. President Bush said that where we have to abandon free market principles to save the free market, and fundamentally, we just don’t agree. There’s just no way.

Tea Party support for Newt Gingrich in South Carolina and elsewhere marks a new point — a low point — for the movement. When John McCain suspended his campaign in 2008 to go to Washington to support TARP, Gingrich said, “This is the greatest single act of responsibility ever taken by a presidential candidate and rivals President Eisenhower saying ‘I will go to Korea.’”

The tea party believed that TARP represented Washington at its most irresponsible. Gingrich believed the exact opposite. In fact, if you were to make a list of every big-government issue most tea partiers stand against — bank bailouts, healthcare mandates, cap-and-trade, you name it — Gingrich has been, or still is, on the opposite side.

Grassroots conservatives want a Republican nominee who will fight President Obama on issues like bailouts and healthcare mandates. Saturday, grassroots conservatives in South Carolina championed a Republican presidential candidate who has agreed with Obama on both of those issues. In the debates, Obama could even say that Newt was for forcing Americans to purchase health insurance before he was against it. And the president will be right.

When Gingrich called McCain’s support for TARP “the greatest single act of responsibility ever taken by a presidential candidate,” this was classic Newt-speak — Gingrich is a great talker and often speaks in bold and indeed “grandiose” terms. Newt sounds good. People like that. They respond to it. It inspires them. Ask Barack Obama.

But the tea party was supposed to be better than this. The tea party was supposed to stand for something more substantive.

Read the entire column at The Daily Caller

In an interview with Reason magazine in 1975, Ronald Reagan said:

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism … The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Says Santorum: “I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.”

Santorum is not a Reagan conservative. Not even close.

It surprises people when they learn I’m not a libertarian. As Ron Paul’s official campaign blogger, I’m often perceived as being a libertarian and I am no doubt sympathetic to many libertarian views. But ultimately I’m a traditional conservative — a limited-government constitutionalist of the Barry Goldwater variety. That said, I’m no more offended at being called a libertarian than a heavy metal fan is when called a rock n’ roller — both terms represent far more synthesis than antithesis. Santorum has no comprehension of this basic philosophical and historical truism.

Being against big government does not represent the totality of American conservatism, but it does represent what Reagan called the “heart and soul” of conservatism. Reagan recognized that the “desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom” was indeed libertarianism but that it was also conservatism. This observation was fairly commonplace on the right during Reagan’s time, when “conservatism” was still more of a substantive philosophy than a Republican marketing tool. For example, in his book “Flying High,” a memoir about the 1964 presidential campaign, William F. Buckley repeatedly refers to Goldwater’s philosophy as “libertarian” and his famous book “The Conscience of a Conservative” as a “libertarian tome.”

So, were Reagan and Buckley wrong about libertarianism’s kinship to conservatism — or is Santorum correct to treat libertarianism as something alien to conservatism? This depends on your definition of that term.

Let’s begin with Reagan’s definition. In addition to calling libertarianism the heart of conservatism, Reagan believed that the American right was a three-legged stool consisting of social conservatives, national security conservatives and economic/libertarian conservatives. Lose a leg and conservatism loses a lot, or so Reagan believed.

During the George W. Bush era, social and national security conservatives were represented well, while the economic/libertarian leg of the American right was virtually non-existent. Conservatives now look back and wonder how a Republican president could have spent so much money. They needn’t wonder long. The notion — which has been advanced by Santorum, Mike Huckabee and others — that libertarian influence in the Republican Party poses a problem is absurd. It was the lack of libertarian principles that defined Bush’s “deficits don’t matter” GOP. “Libertarian influence” in the Republican Party is a problem only if one thinks the national debt is not a problem. Before the tea party and Obama, few Republicans seemed to think it was.

And Santorum was their leader. Writes The Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney:

As a member of Senate leadership, Santorum literally was an agent of the GOP establishment during passage of No Child Left Behind, the expansion of Medicare, and the overspending of the Bush era.

Red State’s Erick Erickson is even more explicit:

Rick Santorum is a pro-life statist. He is. You will have to deal with it. He is a big government conservative. Santorum is right on social issues, but has never let his love of social issues stand in the way of the creeping expansion of the welfare state. In fact, he has been complicit in the expansion of the welfare state.

Santorum not only rejects Reagan’s concept of conservatism as a three-legged stool, he admits he is eager to kick out the libertarian leg. When Santorum says, “I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement,” he is essentially saying that he fights strongly against what Reagan considered the integral core of American conservatism. This is not to say that Reagan or even Goldwater were libertarianism personified — only that any person who calls themselves a “Goldwater” or “Reagan” conservative also must be a libertarian to some degree in their philosophy. Goldwater would have likely agreed with this sentiment. Reagan certainly did.

Read the entire column

And expect the worst attacks to come from Republicans.

Let’s cut the crap. The GOP establishment’s main beef with Ron Paul is his foreign policy. This ideological chasm is the subtext to most attacks on Paul from the right. To their credit, some of Paul’s critics are man (or woman) enough to confront the congressman on this subject directly. Paul welcomes these challenges and wants his fellow Republicans to debate what a true conservative foreign policy should look like. But the members of the Republican establishment do not want any such discussion. In fact, they fear it.

Most of the 2012 Republican presidential contenders subscribe primarily to a neoconservative foreign policy — the reflexively pro-war, world-police dogma that has been the dominant view in the Republican Party for at least a decade. When Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was asked by David Gregory on “Meet the Press” in October, “Would you describe yourself as a neoconservative then?” Cain replied: “I’m not sure what you mean by neoconservative … I’m not familiar with the neoconservative movement.” Cain was being honest — he simply knew how most Republicans viewed foreign policy and generally agreed with them. What was this “neoconservatism” Gregory spoke of? Said Cain: “I’m a conservative, yes. Neoconservative — labels sometimes put you in a box.”

“Neoconservative” certainly is a label that puts you in a box. The prefix alone invites curiosity (which is why neoconservatives don’t like it) and the term itself suggests that it represents something different from plain old conservatism (which is why neoconservatives really don’t like it). Neoconservative Max Boot outlined the ideology in 2002: “Neoconservatives believe in using American might to promote American ideals abroad … [The] agenda is known as ‘neoconservatism,’ though a more accurate term might be ‘hard Wilsonianism’ …” Of President Bush’s “hard Wilsonianism,” columnist George Will and National Review founder William F. Buckley said the following during an exchange in 2005:

WILL: Today, we have a very different kind of foreign policy. It’s called Wilsonian. And the premise of the Bush doctrine is that America must spread democracy, because our national security depends upon it. And America can spread democracy. It knows how. It can engage in national building. This is conservative or not?

BUCKLEY: It’s not at all conservative. It’s anything but conservative …

As the Founders understood well, it is hard-to-impossible to preserve limited government at home while maintaining big government abroad. History and experience tell us that one always begets the other. This certainly rings true as we spend trillions of dollars on domestic programs that we match with trillions more overseas….

Like every other conservative, Paul believes that America must have a strong national defense — he simply believes we can no longer afford our current irrational offense.

Unfortunately, unlimited Pentagon spending remains the big government too many Republicans still love. During the Reagan era, when we were fighting a global superpower that possessed thousands of nuclear weapons, this made sense. It does not make sense anymore. Today, we are fighting individuals, or collections of individuals, with infinitely less military capabilities and no particular attachments to nation-states. Ask yourself this: What, exactly, does having thousands of troops stationed in Afghanistan do to prevent some sick individual from trying to blow up his underwear on an airplane? Just as important, ask this: Does having thousands of troops in places like Afghanistan make it less likely — or more likely — that some sick individual will try to blow up his underwear on an airplane? Our own military and CIA intelligence tells us that our overseas wars actually encourage terrorist attacks. A majority of the members of the U.S. military agree, or as a Pew Research Poll of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans published in October revealed: “About half (51 percent) of post-9/11 veterans say that the use of military force to fight terrorism creates hatred that breeds more terrorism.”

These are basic questions that Americans desperately need to ask. Ron Paul is asking them. The other candidates don’t even consider them questions.

Which brings us to conservatism’s fate. Want to know why Paul is the only GOP presidential candidate who has proposed substantive spending cuts — $1 trillion in the first year? It’s because only Paul addresses Pentagon spending, the largest portion of our budget after entitlements. What the Republican candidates who eschew Paul’s foreign policy are essentially saying is this: We support limited government in theory but in practice it’s simply too dangerous. Paul continues to make the same argument that former Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff Mike Mullen has made: that our debt is the greatest threat to our national security. Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and the other GOP candidates do not see our debt as a similar threat — if they did, they would be calling for bigger spending cuts.

As for national security concerns, Paul’s $1 trillion in cuts still allows for a defense budget four times greater than China’s and larger than even President George W. Bush’s 2005 defense budget. This is how drastically Pentagon spending — along with all government spending — has grown under President Obama. Cries from the GOP field that Obama is “weakening” our defense with “cuts” mirrors liberal shrieking about conservatives hurting the poor or seniors by reforming welfare or entitlements (just ask Paul Ryan).

Big-government advocates always claim that any changes or reductions in the status quo would be catastrophic. Conservatives always argue that not only can we no longer afford such spending, but that reducing big government will be better for all parties involved in the long run. Republicans can remain doubtful about whether Paul’s foreign policies will actually make us safer (they will, if our own intelligence and military members are to be believed). But they cannot doubt that Paul’s foreign policy addresses a cost we can no longer afford (our current foreign policy and related spending costs about $1.2 trillion annually, roughly our entire deficit).

Read the entire column at The Daily Caller

The turn will come when we entrust the conduct of our affairs to the men  who understand that their first duty as public officials is to divest themselves  of the power that they have been given. It will come when Americans, in hundreds  of communities throughout the nation, decide to put the man in office who is  pledged to enforce the Constitution and restore the Republic.

In 1995, authors Alvin and Heidi Toffler published “Creating a New  Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave.” The Tofflers formulated something  they called the “futurist” movement, in which they believed technological  advancement would usher in massive civilizational change. One of the  implications of their envisioned societal transformation was alluded to on page  91 of their futurist tome:

For this wisdom above all, we thank Mr. Jefferson, who helped create the  system that served us so well for so long and that now must, in its turn, die  and be replaced.

“The system … Mr. Jefferson … helped create … now must … die and be  replaced”?

We can safely assume the Tofflers were speaking of Thomas Jefferson. We can  also infer that “the system” Mr. Jefferson and his generation helped create was  the experiment in limited government known as the United States  Constitution.

Wrote Newt Gingrich in the foreword to “Creating a New Civilization”:

This book is a key effort in the direction of empowering citizens … to  truly take the leap to invent a (new) civilization.

“A new civilization”?

Goldwater believed that conservatives would finally win the day when “Americans, in hundreds of communities throughout the nation, decide to put the  man in office who is pledged to enforce the Constitution and restore the  Republic.” Yet the man many Republicans currently want to put in this nation’s  highest office once heartily endorsed a fad philosophy that essentially  advocated the death of the U.S. Constitution to make way for a “new  civilization” that would replace the old republic.

Not that the current Republican presidential front-runner has ever been a big  fan of the Constitution. Based on his record, we can assume that Gingrich’s “new  civilization” would include individual health care mandates, cap-and-trade, bank  bailouts, gun control, amnesty for illegal aliens, No Child Left Behind, Medicare Plan D, Planned  Parenthood funding — all of which our Constitution prohibits. No wonder Gingrich  needs our nation’s founding charter out of the way.

But rattling off Gingrich’s many liberal policy offenses is easy. What is far  more disturbing than Newt’s constant support for dreadful ideas is his  consistently anti-conservative frame of mind from which they spring. Russell  Kirk wrote that, “In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds  the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos … A people’s historic continuity  of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than  the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers.”

Completely void of Kirk’s custom-and-habit conservatism, Gingrich has not  only always been eager to follow outlandish “coffee-house philosophers” like the  Tofflers, he fancies himself as one — and Newt has always been way  over-caffeinated. Gingrich is really not the oft-perceived brilliant man  brimming with innovative ideas, but a political schizophrenic whose  philosophical center never holds because he doesn’t have one. Said former  Congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK), “I’ve known Newt now for 30 years almost. But  I wouldn’t be able to describe what his real principles are.”

Read the entire column at The Daily Caller

Enabling governments to “control the governed” has always been easy, as tyranny has long been mankind’s default position: Virtually every regime in history has sought to increase its power. Obliging government to “control itself” has always been the hard part, and nations that value freedom have always tried to place limits on their rulers in recognition of the fact that governors are not always angels.

Most Americans, from the Founding Fathers to the current generation, would likely agree that decisions to wage war are probably the most important decisions our federal government makes. Madison noted that it was a fairly universal truth that the more powerful a government’s leaders, the more interest there will be in going to war. “The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it,” Madison wrote. “[The Constitution] has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.”

Last week, Senator Jim DeMint studied the question of the nine-year-long Iraq War, and decided to end it. I don’t mean “end” the Iraq War in merely the sense that President Obama now advertises — bringing the troops home, ending hostilities, etc. Hell, President Obama starts and ends wars all the time (see: Libya) without even the pretension of seeking legal authority. Sen. DeMint’s support was for something much different and more significant: He voted to end the Iraq War by demanding that the president no longer be able to legally wage it.

The United States hasn’t officially declared war since World War II. Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan — none of these were “wars” officially, though the men and women who fought in them might beg to differ. President Bush took us to war with Iraq in 2003 in the same extra-constitutional manner: He went to Congress to get “authorization,” but still both Congress and the president apparently thought that the Iraq War wasn’t important enough to merit an official declaration of war, as the Constitution demands.

When Senator Rand Paul offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act last month that would revoke the authorization given to Bush in 2003 regarding Iraq, only three Republican senators joined him: DeMint, Dean Heller of Nevada and moderate Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine. There were plenty of Democrats who voted for Paul’s amendment. Of course, there were plenty of Democrats who were against the Iraq War from the beginning, though they were probably not motivated by limited-government considerations.

Sen. DeMint supported the Iraq War. Most Republicans did. Conservatives can now debate whether that support, in retrospect, was justified. But Sen. Paul’s amendment was a debate over whether the Iraq War is still justified today. Paul’s amendment was also a debate over whether giving the president of the United States carte blanche in Iraq is still justified. Only four Republicans said “no.”

It is DeMint’s vote that is the most instructive. Sen. Paul is a tea party champion who has always been upfront about his opposition to the Iraq War. While her vote was commendable, Sen. Snowe is not exactly a guiding light for most Republicans. Sen. Heller probably has the lowest profile of the four. But Sen. DeMint is a conservative’s conservative. The right has long followed DeMint’s lead on most issues. Conservatives need to follow it on Iraq and executive power too.

Read the entire column at The Daily Caller

A few days ago, some Republican senators attempted to lay the groundwork for a shooting war with Russia. I wish I were exaggerating.

Last week, while most senators were focused on the important national issues of war funding and Americans’ constitutional liberties, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) seemed more concerned with the fate of a foreign country. Behind the scenes, Rubio moved to have a unanimous consent vote that would have hastened Georgia’s entry into NATO. The unanimous consent vote never happened because Senator Rand Paul single-handedly prevented it.

This is not a triviality. Make no mistake: Bringing Georgia into NATO could lead to a new military conflict for the United States, which is why any move that would facilitate Georgia’s entry into the alliance should be publicly debated. Rubio’s attempt to push this through by unanimous consent — that is to say, without any formal debate or vote — is highly suspect and calls into question the senator’s better judgment.

But what Sen. Rubio is advocating is nothing new. Examining the political context of McCain’s declaration of solidarity with Georgia in 2008 should give Americans pause about the Washington establishment’s foreign policy agenda. After the 2008 South Ossetia conflict, Pat Buchanan wrote:

Who is Randy Scheunemann? He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States. But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role. He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

Continued Buchanan:

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 — pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili. What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia. Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

Buchanan’s description of Scheunemann and his activities is instructive because Georgia’s entry into NATO would commit the United States to fighting for Georgia. Buchanan explains what would have happened in 2008 if Georgia had been part of NATO at that time:

Had [Scheunemann succeeded], U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann’s client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.

Read the entire column at The Daily Caller

Commenting on the controversial Section 1031 of the National Defense Authorization Act — which many contend gives the federal government new powers to arrest American citizens without charge — Sen. Lindsey Graham made clear this week that “1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.”

The entire world is now a “battlefield”? “Including the homeland”?

There have been serious constitutional questions raised recently concerning whether our federal government should be able to arrest or assassinate American citizens overseas without charge or trial. This new and largely uncharted legal territory has been troublesome. But arresting or assassinating American citizens here in the United States without trial? Rounding up and holding American citizens indefinitely without charge? What country is this?

This is a new and unprecedented government power that should scare the living hell out of every last American. Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) rightly called it “one of the most anti-liberty pieces of legislation of our lifetime.” Jim Gilmore, former Virginia governor and chairman of the Congressional Panel on Terrorism, roundly denounced it: “The provisions of this bill undermine the basic safeguards that we enjoy as Americans. It is dangerous, and should not be supported by anyone: Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, citizen or non-citizen.”

Added Gilmore: “This ill-considered bill is one of those dangers to our liberties by an unwise extension of military power in the homeland contrary to all law, precedent and history.”

As Amash and Gilmore note — and Graham ignores — the basic constitutional principle of protecting individual liberties through due process is not some negotiable piece of historical trivia. It is the bedrock of the most rudimentary American and Western law dating all the way back to the Magna Carta. Accepting this legislation blindly — as the majority of both parties seem entirely comfortable with — is to surrender the most basic of American liberties. Said Sen. Rand Paul, who fought hard and mostly alone to strip the National Defense Authorization Act of this terrifying provision: “Should we err today and remove some of the most important checks on state power in the name of fighting terrorism, well, then the terrorists have won.”

And the terrorists have won. If a primary purpose of terrorism is to induce fear, and Americans are willing to give up their most precious freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism, how is this anything less than a monumental victory for our enemies?

Read the entire column at The Daily Caller