The Law Is Not Optional
This Is a Constitutional Crisis, Not a News Cycle
By R.A. Modro
There are moments in history when silence becomes complicity.
This is one of them.
The President of the United States has undertaken unilateral military action against a sovereign nation without a declaration of war, without clear congressional authorization, and in open defiance of both domestic and international law. Members of Congress are now publicly calling this action illegal. Some are calling for impeachment. International voices are calling for investigation, indictment, and arrest under the framework of international law.
This is not a policy disagreement.
This is not partisan noise.
This is a rupture.
When a president claims the authority to invade, detain foreign leaders, and redraw the boundaries of global order by force, without the consent of the people’s representatives, he is no longer acting as a constitutional executive. He is acting as something else entirely.
And history has a name for that.
This Is a Constitutional Crisis, Not a News Cycle
The U.S. Constitution is explicit: Congress holds the power to declare war. This safeguard exists for a reason. It is meant to prevent exactly what we are witnessing now, one individual wielding the full destructive power of the state based on personal ideology, political calculation, or economic interest.
When that safeguard is ignored, the law does not simply bend. It breaks.
The justification offered, drug trafficking, national security, “order,” is familiar. We have heard it before. It is the language every empire uses when it wishes to cloak aggression in moral necessity. And yet, beneath the rhetoric, the realities are painfully clear: strategic dominance, economic leverage, oil, power.
Call it what it is.
International Law Is Not a Suggestion
The United States helped build the post-World War II international legal order precisely to prevent unilateral acts of aggression. That framework, so often invoked when convenient, is now being discarded when it becomes inconvenient.
Other nations are watching. Allies are recoiling. Adversaries are recalibrating. And the precedent being set is devastating: that international law applies to everyone except the most powerful.
That is not leadership.
That is lawlessness.
When governments abroad begin openly discussing criminal accountability for an American president, the issue is no longer “optics.” It is legitimacy.
The Danger Is Not Abroad, It’s Here
The greatest threat to the United States is not Venezuela, or China, or Russia.
It is the normalization of unchecked power.
It is the slow corrosion of democratic restraint.
It is the belief that “our side” justifies any action.
It is the seduction of strongman rule wrapped in the flag.
A president who ignores Congress today will ignore courts tomorrow. A president who treats law as optional abroad will treat it as optional at home. The through-line is unmistakable.
This is how democracies fail, not all at once, but by acclimation.
What Is Required of Us Now
This is the moment HOLY TROUBLE was made for.
Not silence.
Not exhaustion.
Not cynical resignation.
But public, principled, relentless resistance… through speech, protest, journalism, litigation, and the ballot box.
Demand congressional action.
Demand investigations.
Demand accountability.
Demand adherence to the rule of law.
History will not ask whether we were polite.
It will ask whether we stood up when the law was being dismantled in plain sight.
There are times when neutrality is not moderation… it is surrender.
This is one of those times.