GAVEL GAMUT
By Jim Redwine
www.jamesmredwine.com
(Week of 08 December 2025)
A NEW WORLD RESOLUTION
A new year is rapidly approaching. Hope for a better world is evidenced by universal blame placing, always onto someone else. Perhaps Jeffrey Epstein, or Donald Trump or Lane Kiffin or the idiot driving slowly in the passing lane. Or as Jimmy Buffett finally admitted in Margaritaville, “It was his own fault”.
One thing each of us believes is it is never our fault. Yet, in a republic, the United States for example, it is the fault of all citizens since we either choose or allow to remain in office our representatives. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth may have ordered Admiral Frank Bradley to carry out Commander in Chief Donald Trump’s order to kill the people on the alleged drug boat on September 02, 2025, but in America the President represents all of us. In the court of world opinion, each American violated our Constitution’s Bill of Rights and Due Process clauses as contained within the New World Resolutions of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
Our Founders were well aware of the irony contained within those famous New World Resolutions, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal”. They knew that thousands of years of human history belied such a reality. What real truth they knew to be self-evident was that power does not corrupt humans, it enables them to be corrupt. The words were aspirational, not factual. The Constitution of the United States designed a framework for a system of government in which the natural inclination of humans to abuse power is sublimated to the competing powers of the majority who would abide by Due Process of Law.
If the eighty-one people we have killed in the Venezuelan boats were drug runners, there are well established procedures for determining those facts and for dealing with each situation. The U.S.A. has the most powerful military on earth. Even if the Venezuelan government was sponsoring those boats, its military is impotent against ours.
Our aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers and aircraft can and do monitor every craft that comes within our United States territorial waters. We have the ability and authority to force any such drug boat or fishing boat, to stand down and be searched without danger to American personnel or equipment.
We could safely and thoroughly search such boats and vet their sailors as to drugs or other illegal contents. If such criminal intent against America were to be evidenced, the occupants could be arrested and taken before a court in the United States or a world authorized legal body. Any drugs could be confiscated, used as evidence and later destroyed and the drug runners imprisoned.
Such a procedure is what our Founders would have demanded from King George III. It is called Due Process. As the folk singer Phil Ochs sang in his song, Is There Anybody Here:
♫Is there anybody here
Who thinks that following the orders takes away the blame?
Is there anybody here
Who wouldn’t mind to murder by another name?♫
We Americans who claim to be a light to the world should shout STOP! when our representatives justify killing others without affording them the rights we demand for ourselves. America was born in 1776 and should not lose its aspirational soul after only 249 years. For as Phil Ochs also said in his song, ♫This country is too young to die♫. America today can re-pledge our “Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor” to the hopes our Founders knew had not yet been made possible but that they and we should resolve to make reality. Due process should be our talisman, not just our hope.
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