War & Peace Quote by Mitt Romney

Romney’s line is less a legal argument than a boundary-drawing exercise: it tells voters who counts as “us” and who gets pushed outside the circle of obligation. The key move is the pairing of “our citizens” with “enemy combatants,” a binary that turns constitutional law into a loyalty test. By naming Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he doesn’t need to litigate principles; he imports a ready-made symbol of trauma and rage. The audience hears 9/11 before they hear “Constitutional rights.”

The phrasing “Conservatives believe” is a subtle branding tactic. It implies a moral clarity and consistency that opponents supposedly lack, recasting a contested policy debate (military tribunals, detention, due process) as a question of identity: are you on the team that protects Americans, or the one that coddles terrorists? “Providing” rights is telling, too; it frames rights as a discretionary benefit handed out by a government, not as constraints on government power that activate precisely when the state is most tempted to overreach.

Context matters: this is post-9/11 politics where “terrorism” became a domestic sorting mechanism. Romney is channeling an era of Republican messaging that treated constitutional protections as privileges of membership rather than principles that demonstrate confidence in the rule of law. The subtext isn’t just that Mohammed is undeserving; it’s that extending process to him risks contaminating the category of citizen itself. It’s security rhetoric doing cultural work: reassuring the in-group by narrowing the meaning of rights to those who feel safe to defend.