"Take the guns first. Go through due process second."

As has been widely reported on sites across the political spectrum, Donald Trump said that we should suspend due process to take people's guns.

Hey, how awesome: the president of the USA suggesting that we discard fundamental rights that have been guaranteed since the Constitution received its first ten amendments--the Bill of Rights. The president of the United States takes an oath to uphold the Constitution. Donald Trump just expressed a cavalier willingness to ignore the Constitution's second, fifth and fourteenth amendments.

The men who voted for the Second Amendment could not have possibly imagined that they were voting to allow people to carry weapons that could kill dozens of people in seconds or minutes. Guns were still muzzle-loaders. You could kill more quickly with a gun's bayonet than with its bullets. But no matter: the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms.  I believe that there are reasonable limits to the right to bear arms--nobody in their right mind is arguing that people should be allowed to buy their own personal nuclear armaments, even though a nuclear bomb could be classified as "arms." Similarly, I don't believe it's undue restriction on the freedom of speech to outlaw incitement to violence ("Let's kill him," is not just speech when it inspires action). But the Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms. Any move to change that should be approached with deliberation and care.

What bothers me more is the willingness to discard due process. The Republicans like to talk about the rule of law--will they stand up for the rule of law when the president calls for suspending due process?  The Fifth Amendment states that no one shall " be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The Fourteenth, adopted after the Civil War to curtail the right of the individual states to limit any person's rights, repeats these words, guaranteeing that no state may "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

Due process of law is one of the things that truly does make the United States of America better. That the US has done as good a job maintaining due process is one of the things that truly makes the US great. The US has not always given due process, and those failures are among the nation's greatest shames.

Due process can be difficult and tedious, but due process is what separates a civilized nation of laws from lawless mob rule.

The U.S. Constitution is not without its flaws, but it remains a great work. Its aspirations toward setting up a stable system of Democracy that guarantees individual liberties rather than the rule of despots are noble. Its guarantee of liberties may be nobler than their historical manifestation, but even so, the U.S. has been viewed as a land of freedom and opportunity by people from around the world because many national governments do not offer the same liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

The Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, are documents that are fundamentally concerned with guaranteeing individual liberties--they are fundamentally liberal documents. Let's hope that Donald Trump's hostility to liberals does not end up in ignoring the fundamental liberties that make this nation great.