I’ve spent the last 10 days in London, a city I love. History, architecture, museums, tea, the accent — it is perfection. But the Mother Country is slightly retarded on the meaning of the rule of law.

I appeared at an event on Monday evening hosted by The Spectator magazine to debate the question, “Is America Great Again?” Me: YES! Peter Hitchens: No. (As an aside, I won!) The “go-to” line of my debate opponents — that is, Hitchens and the audience — was, But what about the rule of law?

President Trump is blowing up Venezuelan boats. He’s deploying the National Guard to our cities. He’s allowing immigration officers to beat up, arrest, detain and deport illegal aliens. All this, they say, violates the rule of law, morality, decency and the very foundation of Anglo-Saxon order.

Which can only mean Londoners read The New York Times, and not ironically.

First, the poor “fishermen.” The president is the commander in chief of the military, charged with defending our country from foreign attack and not, for example, ensuring the peace in Mogadishu, Ukraine, the Middle East, the Balkans, etc. etc. etc. As noble as those goals may be, that’s not what Americans are paying taxes for, and it’s not the president’s job.

The poor fishermen are drug-runners. Drugs pouring into our country from narco-terrorist states and drug cartels kill about 100,000 Americans every year. That’s more than were killed in the entire Korean War and Vietnam War combined. For comparison, Islamic terrorists have killed fewer than 5,000 people on U.S. soil in the past 25 years.

We finally have a president deploying our military to save American lives, and Londoners seem to imagine that Trump has stomped all over the rule of law. We wouldn’t hear a note of dissension if only he were using our troops to feed starving Somalians or bomb Yugoslavia.

The Britons were particularly exercised that, by firing on Venezuelan narco-terrorists in our own hemisphere, Trump had violated the War Powers Act of 1973 — the flaw of which should be immediately apparent from the words “of 1973.” Passed by the post-Watergate Congress, during what was known as “the most destructive period in American history,” the law demands that presidents get congressional approval before deploying troops for more than 60 days.

(How was this a response to Watergate? Evidently, if only President Johnson hadn’t gotten us involved in a ground war in Asia, there never would have been a break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate hotel.)

The law is obviously unconstitutional — again, the president is the commander in chief — and every president has ignored it, including President Obama, who didn’t get approval from Congress before bombing Libya for most of 2011, until Moammar Gadhafi was killed in late October. Hillary Clinton, the war’s architect (despite being not the commander in chief, but instead secretary of state), exulted, “We came. We saw. He died.”

You’d think that this boneheaded use of the U.S. military would be imprinted on every Briton’s psyche, inasmuch as it did absolutely nothing for our country but “enriched” the U.K. to the tune of about 400,000 Africans, who hopped on boats to Europe the moment Gadhafi was no longer there to stop them.

Nope. Bomb foreigners pointlessly — that’s cool. Use the military to protect American lives, and it’s the end of the rule of law.

As for the National Guard deployments to war-torn inner cities, the very reason we have a Constitution and not a loosely defined Articles of Confederation is because of Shays’ Rebellion in 1787, when 4,000 soldiers marched on an armory in Massachusetts, intending to seize weapons and overthrow the government.

A series of similar uprisings quickly made clear that the articles’ weak federal government was incapable of suppressing riots. That’s when the Founding Fathers headed to Philadelphia and produced a Constitution with a strong executive in command of federal troops.

Of course, Shays’ Rebellion was a day at the beach compared to the violent crime roiling our major cities today. In 2020, disaffected inner-city youth and entitled whites erupted in a maelstrom of violence in a poignant tribute to the late fentanyl addict George Floyd. Observing the turmoil, Sen. Tom Cotton wrote a Times op-ed urging Trump to send the military to restore order.

Trump ignored him, perhaps impressed by the Times’ 1-million-word disclaimer disavowing the opinion piece they’d just published, having momentarily forgotten that they’re The New York Times and support violent criminals. Instead, the president sat in bed eating cheeseburgers and tweeting, “LAW AND ORDER!”

Now, five years later, he’s finally giving us law and order (which is his job under the Constitution) using the National Guard (of which he’s the commander in chief under the Constitution). But Londoners somehow see this as a dire threat to the rule of law.

Speaking of the rule of law, illegal immigrants are breaking it. As luck would have it, it’s the president’s job to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But, for the past 50 years, it never dawned on a single president that “the laws” include immigration laws. Until now.

District court judges keep issuing opinions saying the president can’t — among other things — turn away illegals at the border, end the temporary protected status of certain immigrants, expedite deportations, detain illegals subject to deportation and so on. But there’s nothing in the Constitution or in federal law to suggest that the judiciary’s interpretation (don’t enforce the law) is superior to Trump’s (enforce the law).

In fact, the Constitution suggests exactly the opposite.

The entirety of the executive branch resides in this one man’s hands, whereas judges are merely constituent parts of a co-equal branch. Both are required to interpret laws — the president to take care that they be faithfully executed, and judges to decide cases and controversies.

A president is no more required to accept a court’s interpretation of the law than courts are to accept the president’s interpretation. The Supreme Court wins, but that’s only by custom, not the law.

So far, Trump’s interpretation has almost always been correct, and the district courts wrong, according to the high court. Remember his unconstitutional “Muslim ban”? (At least I was assured it was unconstitutional by The New York Times.)

Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled: OF COURSE the president has the authority to exclude any foreigners, at all, in the “public interest,” and the courts have no authority to second-guess him.

I’d put all this in a tweet, but with these prim British, so punctilious about the rule of law, I might end up in jail. Unless I’m a Pakistani, in which case I could gang-rape little English girls without risking arrest because the police don’t want to appear “racist.” Ah well, it’s the Mother Country. We must learn from them about the sacred rule of law.

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