Politics & Power Quote by Peter King

King’s line is less about law than about choreography: it stages a showdown between “the United States of America” and a supposedly alien threat that, in his telling, must never be allowed to touch American civic space. The crucial move is procedural hardball disguised as principled resolve. “Cut off all funding” isn’t a debate about evidence, guilt, or constitutional limits; it’s a budgetary kill switch. If you can’t win an argument on the merits, you can starve the argument of oxygen.

The phrase “in any court” is doing sweeping work. It collapses military commissions, federal courts, and due process into one contaminated category: the idea that ordinary institutions are too fragile, too “soft,” to handle extraordinary evil. That’s the subtext: not only are the defendants beyond legal recognition, the legal system itself is suspect for even entertaining them.

Then comes the geography: “Downtown Manhattan.” It’s a deliberate emotional pin. Mentioning Manhattan conjures proximity, trauma, and symbolic desecration, turning a venue choice into a rerun of 9/11 itself. “Misguided plan” frames the opposition as naïve at best, reckless at worst, while “other 9/11 terrorists” flattens individual cases into a single, unanswerable moral category.

Context matters: this sits squarely in the post-9/11 political economy where toughness is currency and legal process is cast as indulgence. King’s intent is to foreclose a civilian trial not by persuading the public that federal courts can’t handle terrorism (they historically have), but by making the very idea feel like betrayal.