The United States is actively involved in the immoral and incredibly damaging Saudi military campaign in Yemen. And as millions of women and children die, the Donald Trump administration finds a way to aid Saudi Arabia by sending drones to the already devastated country.
But as Trump’s use (read abuse) of the executive branch’s drone program begins to troublesome well-meaning liberals who opposed him during the presidential campaign, one must wonder where were these same liberals with President Barack Obama also abused the drone program put in motion by President George W. Bush to kill innocent women and children in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other parts of the Middle East.
After an American teenager was killed without due process under the orders of Obama, few, if any, progressives attacked the president for it. But now that we’re effectively using our drone fleet to aid the Saudis in the further destruction of an already-war torn land, people seem to be finally getting angry at the president.
As noted by Matt Taibbi in a recent Rolling Stone article, the “ability to kill by remote control without judicial review was one of the many gifts we bequeathed to Trump prior to his inauguration.” And that’s because the powers granted to Obama were never challenged when Bush was in power, and they were certainly seldom challenged with Obama lived in the White House.
While Sen. Rand Paul stood for 13 hours in a filibuster that went down in history for targeting Obama’s drone program and its unconstitutionality, few on the left helped to elevate the debate among their own circles, allowing the president to go virtually unchallenged for most of his presidency.
Now that Trump has inherited these powers, we are once again forced to ask ourselves if the federal government isn’t simply too powerful, and if there is anything we can do to put an end to this.
As we can see, there is no way we can shrink the power of the federal government by putting another president in Trump’s or Obama’s or Bush’s place. It’s also impossible to shrink the government and its power by pushing Congress to act. The only way to actually force the government to abandon its unlawful — and immoral — activities is to actually spread liberty.
The more people understand that liberty, and not a powerful federal government, is the only framework capable of giving us the proper environment to develop both economically and morally, the faster we will stop looking at the government for all answers, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
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