When the issue of President Donald Trump appointing the next US Supreme Court Justice was first raised with the retirement of Justice Kennedy, I observed that it is imperative that the next Supreme Court nominee is questioned on vital national security matters.

Here is an excellent concise summation of nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s views and record in this regard by Hina Shamsi, Director, ACLU National Security Project.

Kavanaugh does have a well-developed record in cases involving national security, civil liberties, and human rights from his time on the D.C. Circuit. That record shows extreme deference to presidential claims to act unchecked in the name of war or national security. It also demonstrates hostility to international law as a constraint on government action as well as an unwillingness to hold the government to account when it violates the constitutional and human rights of U.S. citizens and noncitizens.

It is imperative that the American people not acquiesce their grave responsibility but forcefully press their elected Senators and the news media to question and hold fully accountable this nominee for his viewpoint on vital national security issues such as the Constitutional power to declare war, Habeas Corpus, warrantless detention, warrantless surveillance, torture, rendition, national security letters, and the constitutionality of Continuity of Government (COG) and covert operations of the intelligence agencies.

Does the judicial nominee hold that the Constitution established a federal decentralized compact or republic of sovereign independent states granting explicit delegated powers to the general government for specific purposes while retaining their reserved powers for themselves? Or does the United States simply pose as a sham elective democracy but is in fact a militarized despotism with actual power residing in the hands of a secret oligarchy that is arbitrary, capricious, and unaccountable, a tyranny lacking transparency, justice, or restraint?

Which is precisely why we must move now to raise these crucial questions for the Supreme Court nominee before hearings are held. We must organize in our neighborhoods and families, in our clubs, churches, and with colleagues from work, pressing hard the media and our elected officials, cutting across all  ideological and demographic divisional lines of left or right, of race and class, as a broad national referendum on what America has become and what we want her to be for the future. This informal coalition of interest could serve multiple purposes but it should primarily bring into the sunlight the nature and origins of the national security state and the spurious props and fallacious notions which have continued to foster its cancerous growth.

Lew Rockwell once said that all governments would be totalitarian if they could get away with it. “Ours” is definitely trying. With an imperial presidency, an acquiescent Congress, a complaisant and compliant judiciary, an officious and intrusive bureaucracy, and a national security state that is making us less secure at home by its reckless interventionism abroad, plunging us toward tyranny and civilizational collapse. Their solemn oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution were either hollow empty words they mumbled with their fingers callously crossed behind their backs or uttered with an arrogant hubris they misbelieved to be patriotic zeal regarding the true meaning of duty, honor, and fidelity towards that decaying parchment document at the National Archive and what it stands for.

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