Nobody Gets to Rewrite the Constitution - Oct. 8, 2025

Today in support of Senators Schiff and Ka's resolution regarding war powers. This resolution would just say very simply that if the Trump administration wants to be at war against a terrorist organization, they should come to Congress, notify us, and seek our approval.

Currently, the administration is waging a secret war against a secret list of unnamed groups that they will not tell us about.

There's been four lethal strikes against boats in the Caribbean. The administration wrote us a letter, wrote this body a letter about what they were doing in September. They said they consider themselves to be “a non-international armed conflict,” that means a war, against a secret list of “designated terrorist organizations.”

I received a briefing last week on the administration's strikes in the Caribbean. During that briefing, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee from both sides of the aisle asked a Senate confirmed official whether the Department of Defense could produce a list of the organizations that are now considered terrorists by the United States.

They said they could not provide that list.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a CIA officer. I'm a former Pentagon official. I did three tours in Iraq armed alongside the military. I participated in targeting of terrorist groups and I actually have no real problem going against cartels given what they have done in inserting drugs in our community, the death of so many Americans. But as a nation, I think we should have as a basic principle that you can't have a secret list of terrorist organizations that the American public and certainly the US Congress don't get to even know the names of.

The problem for me is that this is unprecedented. You know during the global war on terror which is kind of my era it was very clear terrorist organizations would be notified if we wanted to declare a new terrorist organization it would be notified to Congress, and then our intelligence community, the military, law enforcement would spin up to go after information about that group and prosecute you know targeting against that group.

But that is not what's going on today and we will not understand the apparently dozens of terrorist organizations that we have now named until we understand their names.

Now this is important in the foreign context, right? This is unprecedented in terms of what we've done against foreign adversaries, foreign terrorist organizations. But what I want to draw people's attention to is the implication for what is happening inside our own country.

In September, also last month, the Trump administration put out a new executive order about domestic terrorist organizations. They said that they were going to again make secret lists of terrorist groups inside the United States and send the full force of the US government against those terrorist organizations.

They are not telling anyone the name of these organizations, but they are authorizing law enforcement and the intelligence community to double down and come up with that list.

This is a problem because the Trump administration defined in that document a terrorist organization or domestic terrorism incredibly broadly. It suggests that any group that talks about anti-Christian values, views they don't like on migration or race, differing views on the role of the family, religion, or morality could all be grounds for labeling an organization domestic terrorists.

If this administration is not telling us who's on their secret designated terrorist list for groups in the Caribbean, they're definitely not going to tell us who's on their list of domestic terrorist organizations. We saw to start us off, the attorney general down in Texas put out publicly that he is now going to launch a campaign against domestic terrorist organizations in his own state. So, it has begun.

Meanwhile, we know what's going on in some of our American cities. Trump said that he would invoke potentially the Insurrection Act of 1807. He has made more than 800 of our military generals fly in from across the world and talk about going after the enemy from within, his words, and making American towns and cities their training grounds for the military.

This is important. And I think every American should understand what it means if the president of the United States follows through with what he said and says that we are he's now invoking the insurrection act. That means certain city the violence has gotten to a level of an insurrection and it means that the US military can now be used as law enforcement in our cities. It means the US military can raid, they can arrest, they can detain.

You can easily see a world where the president of the United States labels protest groups terrorists, doesn't tell anyone, creates an excuse to unilaterally use the military inside our cities similar to the way he's used them in the Caribbean.

And just to be clear, this is straight out of an authoritarian playbook, right? where the president gets to play judge, jury, and executioner. This time, instead of stopping drug traffickers, it will be stopping Americans, potentially from exercising their right to freedom of speech.

This is not theoretical using the US military in our streets. This is not something that the president hasn't already thought about. We know that in the first Trump administration, the president called up his secretary of defense, his chairman of the joint chiefs because he was upset about protests that were going on in front of the White House.

Mark Esper was the secretary of defense. He wrote about this in his book called A Sacred Oath and he talked about some of the things that President Trump asked him to do. Trump wanted him to send in not the National Guard but the 82nd Airborne, an active duty military unit, one of our most elite large units to quell protests here in Washington DC. He asked for them to be moved into the city and when the back and forth has happened with former Secretary Esper, President Trump asked him point blank, "Can't you just shoot them in the legs or something?”

I want to just flag for everybody that we are seeing a repeat of that story, but in exponentially more gruesome detail play out right now. The president is looking for an excuse to send in the US military into our streets, to deploy the US military against his own people, to prompt confrontation, and to hope that that confrontation justifies even more military force and military control.

This is a well-worn authoritarian playbook. It's one that quite literally the United States of America was founded on rejecting. the idea that the British soldiers when they occupied American cities abused American citizens to the point where Americans turned against them.

I'm a former CIA officer, a former Pentagon official. I've worked alongside the military my entire life. I cannot stomach the idea that the American people would fear the uniform military that have given their lives to protect them for so many years. But all of us in this chamber and certainly those of us who have served in the past swore an oath to the constitution. Not to a king, not to a party, not to any one person. Nobody gets to rewrite the constitution.

Not a president.

Not an adviser.

No one.

If the president wants to use force abroad or at home, he needs to come to this body and explain it publicly to the American public. Thank you. And with that, I yield back.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin. (2025, October 8). Nobody Gets to Rewrite the Constitution. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ki6UulBYM0&list=PLDLQiUqKaml7HGkg09TU4slz8rpHi2-iJ&index=12