Hadric Rowe has posted The Edge of the Republic Trump’s Foreign Strikes and the Constitutional Erosion of Necessity on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper examines the constitutional, legal, and moral consequences of President Donald Trump’s 2025 military operations in the Caribbean, which were justified under the doctrine of “necessity.” It argues that these actions—conducted without congressional authorization and beyond recognized international law—constituted a deliberate experiment in constitutional endurance. The strikes against alleged Venezuelan “narcoterrorist” vessels were not isolated acts of foreign policy but a calculated test of how far executive power could exceed legal limits without provoking resistance.
Drawing upon constitutional history, judicial precedent, and political philosophy, the paper situates this experiment within the long evolution of executive overreach—from Truman’s Korea to Obama’s drone wars—and identifies Trump’s contribution as the conversion of secrecy into spectacle. The War Powers Resolution, designed to restrain unilateral action, was transformed into a ceremonial formality. Congress’s silence and the courts’ procedural abstention together signaled not balance but abdication. What began as emergency justification evolved into a doctrine of perpetual authority, legitimized by public apathy and institutional fatigue.
The study also traces how imperial power abroad metastasized into domestic governance. The same logic that sanctioned extralegal force overseas—loyalty rhetoric, moral necessity, and administrative discretion—returned home in the language of “law and order.” The erosion of limits thus became psychological as much as legal. Citizens accustomed to permanent warfare began to conflate obedience with patriotism, mistaking command for order.
Ultimately, the paper concludes that the Republic’s collapse will not come through rebellion but through normalization. The Constitution remains intact in form but hollow in function, sustained by rituals of legality that conceal the decay of accountability. The “edge of the Republic” is not a geographic frontier but a moral threshold—the point at which a people forget that freedom requires vigilance, and that silence, repeated long enough, becomes consent.