Killing American Citizens

While this topic has certainly got a lot of (libertarian) press over at Reason, what brought it to my mind was the so-called "Commander-in-Chief" debate hosted on CBS on November 11.  During this debate, both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney were asked about whether they would assassinate Americans like Anwar al-Awlaki.

Since I don't watch news television, I don't know to what degree the media covered the Awlaki assassination.  I imagine it was not covered very much, so I will redirect you to the above link to Reason Magazine and to the less partisan wikipedia page.  If you are not interested in reading the gory details, I will summarize the story.  Anwar al-Awlaki was a Yemeni-American who later became a popular imam and self-proclaimed anti-Western jihadist.  To be clear, he was a citizen of the United States.  He has been linked to many terrorist activities since then, including the "Underwear Bomber," the Times Square Bomber, and the Fort Hood Shooter.  For a more complete list, see the wikipedia page.  In any case, he was put on the Obama Administration's targeted assassination list in early 2010.  Thus we used drone assaults to bomb the various places the administration thought they could kill him.  In September 2011, the United States of America successfully killed him in Yemen.  Two weeks later, we killed his 16 year old son, American citizen Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki. [More below the fold.]

Bill Maher Constitutionalism

On the November 4, 2011 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill had Delware's State Attorney General, "Beau" Biden, on to talk about how the banks are evil.  I was actually impressed with Biden III because he made the correct assertion that the recession was caused by a systemic failure of the market and even admitted to some governmental role.  But since this was only the latest of hundreds of discussions of banking on the show, it was not what piqued my interest.  Toward the end of the interview Maher, presumably looking to insult yet another guest, started berating Delaware for being a small state that the same representation in the Senate as California.  He did make sure to say that Delaware was not the worst sinner in his holier-than-thou eyes, but he said it was a wrong and stupid idea.  Beau Biden seemed, quite reasonably, taken aback by this and muttered something about how great the Founders were and how it seemed like a good policy to him.

Now, one does not have to be an astute constitutional scholar to know that the idea of a bicameral Congress was one of the great compromises that came out of the Constitutional Convention.  I am 90% sure that the problem is mentioned in the musical "1776," not to mention the numerous other media that cover that period of American History.  Indeed, when Bill Maher gets on his bully pulpit, he frequently bemoans the fact that the current Congress cannot get anything done.  So it seems to me that such an astute compromise should be looked at with great admiration.  But instead it is ridiculed and seen as one of the main reasons the Senate gets in the way of all "progress."

The oft-heard retort is that one of the Senate's main purposes is to be such a stumbling block.  That between the filibuster and the equal representation, the states with the largest populations would never be able to exercise their tyranny against the smaller states.  This argument is laughed at by those in Bill Maher's corner and reinforces their idea that there needs to be another Constitutional Convention to right these wrongs. [Continued after the fold]