Judge Andrew Napolitano, speaking to Jesse Ventura on Ventura’s show, said that the expansion of executive powers have led to the “absurd” current notion that President Barack Obama can kill whoever he wants.
Ventura asked Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court Judge and an analyst with Fox News, about his comment that Obama is “an imperial president.”
“Almost all presidents have exceeded to some extent the authority given to them in the Constitution, and each president seems to do it more than his predecessor, but President Obama has taken it to the ultimate extreme, where he has argued--and attempted to do so articulately and rationally--that he on a whim can decide which Americans he can kill,” Napolitano answered. “He claims that he has written laws to govern his own killing, he doesn’t write the laws under the Constitution, only the Congress can, whatever he’s written we can’t see it, he claims that in private he follows those rules, this is absurd. This is something that would please Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.
“So because he has gone beyond George Bush’s ‘I can arrest whoever I want, incarcerate them without a trial, and I can torture whoever I want,’ because he’s gone to the ‘I can kill whoever I want,’ he’s taken on the trappings of an emperor, and hence the reason that I called him an imperial president,” Napolitano added.
He said that he sees the way Congress and the courts, or the other two branches of power, have stayed silent in the midst of this happening is worrying.
Ventura agreed with Napolitano and wondered: “What’s the next president going to do?”
N: next book suicide pact, the COnstitution, and the radical expansion of executive power after 9/11.
“It’s almost inconceivable what the next president could do,” Napolitano said, noting that his next book is about the “radical expansion” of executive power after 9/11. “I could make a suggestion--it’s terrifying--and that’s probably mass incarceration, or mass dissapearings of people, sort of like the governments that we fought wars against so that those things would not happen here.”
“They might happen here with a popularly elected yet tyranncial president,” he said, noting that he’s worried.
The pair also discussed their opinion that the political ideology “libertarian,” which they both identify as, has been hijacked by conservatives.
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