America’s in a post-Constitutional state, where divine rights no longer apply.

While you’re savoring your morning cup o’ joe, imagine the president of the United States hunched over his own coffee, considering the murder of another American citizen. Now, if you were plotting to kill an American over coffee, you could end up in jail on a whole range of charges including – depending on the situation – terrorism. However, if the president’s doing the killing, it’s all nice and – let’s put those quote marks around it – “legal.” How do we know? We’re assured that the Justice Department tells him so. And that’s justice enough in post-Constitutional America.

Through what seems to have been an Obama administration leak to the Associated Press, we recently learned that the president and his top officials believe a U.S. citizen – name unknown to us out here – probably somewhere in the tribal backlands of Pakistan, is reputedly planning attacks against Americans abroad. As a result, the White House has, for the last several months, been considering whether or not to assassinate him by drone without trial or due process.

Last May, Obama gave a speech on the subject. It was, in part, a response to growing anger in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere over the CIA’s ongoing drone assassination campaigns. In it, he insisted that any target of the drones must pose “a continuing and imminent threat to the American people.” At the time, the White House also issued a fact sheet that stated: “Lethal force must only be used to prevent or stop attacks against U.S. persons, and even then, only when capture is not feasible and no other reasonable alternatives exist to address the threat effectively.” While that sounds like a pretty imposing set of hurdles to leap, all of the “legal” criteria are determined in secret by the White House with advice from the Justice Department, but with no oversight or accountability.

THE ADMINISTRATION ADMITS TO KILLING FOUR AMERICANS.

At this point, it’s unclear just why the Obama administration leaked its plans in reference to this errant American abroad. After all, official after official has insisted that Edward Snowden’s revelations of secret NSA documents have caused terrorists to change their communication tactics, yet the one American up to no good somewhere in the terrorist world apparently has not done so in response to the leak about his potential fate, and will remain locatable whenever needed as a target. Under the circumstances, an American connected with al-Qaeda wouldn’t exactly have to be a Bond villain to decide to change his behavior and his location, stay indoors or outdoors more, keep off his phone for a while or trade it in for another.

The Obama administration admits to killing four Americans as part of its war on (or is it “war of”?) terror. We’ll pause here a moment for you to contemplate whether there could have been other, undocumented killings of the same sort awaiting the revelations of some future Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning. On May 7, 2011, a U.S. drone fired a missile in Yemen aimed at American citizen and key terror suspect Anwar al-Awlaki. The missile blew up a car with two other people in it, quickly labeled “al-Qaeda operatives” after we killed them.

Such collateral killings should be no surprise. The inaugural article by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill at their new media venture notes that the National Security Agency regularly identifies targets for CIA assassinations based on metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking. Rather than confirming that target’s identity, the CIA is evidently ready and willing to blow a suspect away based on the location of a mobile phone he assumedly is using. In other words, people can be killed because they borrowed the wrong cell phone. (So much for a deliberative process.)

Though the president and his officials go to great pains to indicate that such assassinations are only going to happen abroad, there is nothing in the carefully worded distinctions made by the White House to preclude them at home. As a start, in his criteria for killing someone extrajudicially, the president claims there is no difference between an American citizen terrorist and a foreign terrorist. A careful look back at the statements of two government officials makes it clear that thought has already gone into the question of bringing the killings home. Remember the testimony then-FBI Director Robert Mueller gave before a House subcommittee in 2012? When asked point-blank if the president could order the killing of an American in the United States, he replied “Uh, I’m not certain whether that was addressed or not… I’m going to defer that to others in the Department of Justice.” Mueller, of course, had the option of saying flat-out, “No, no, of course the president can’t order a hit on an American here in the U.S. where the full judicial system, Constitution, and due process protections exist!”

The truth emerged in 2013 when Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, asked point-blank whether the president could authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against an American citizen in the United States. Attorney General Eric Holder fired back that while the question was “hypothetical,” the real-world answer was yes. Holder said he could imagine “an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the United States.”

It’s still possible to remember, almost nostalgically, how the Fifth Amendment used to guarantee Americans due process. The key phrase was indeed that “due process.” It meant the government could not take away your property or imprison or execute you without first allowing you a chance to defend yourself. You would have your day in court. This would all be quite public and the people involved would be held accountable for their actions. The Fifth was meant by those who wrote it as a check on the ultimate in government excess: the purposeful taking of citizens’ lives. Today, it increasingly seems an artifact of a quaint past, as lost to history as the corded phone or manual typewriter.

Attorney General Eric Holder publicly rewrote the Fifth Amendment in 2012, declaring, in a veiled reference to al-Awlaki, “that a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to ‘due process’ and that the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protection against depriving a citizen of his or her life without due process of law does not mandate a ‘judicial process.’”

The due process question Holder dismissed so casually still looms large over al-Awlaki’s murder. Prior to the killing, attorneys for his father tried to persuade a U.S. District Court to issue an injunction preventing the government from killing him in Yemen. A judge dismissed the case, ruling that the father did not have “standing” to sue and that government officials were immune from lawsuits for actions carried out as part of their official duties.

“NO, NO, OF COURSE THE PRESIDENT CAN’T ORDER A HIT ON AN AMERICAN.”

This was the first time a father had sought to sue the U.S. government to prevent it from killing a son without trial.

The judge’s decision to pass on getting involved was revealing of our moment. The extrajudicial killing of an American citizen seemed to him to be nothing but a political question to be argued out in Congress and the White House, not something intimately woven into the founding documents of our nation.

There are, however, no footnotes in the Fifth Amendment, no caveats, no secret memos, no exceptions for terrorism, mass rape, child torture, or any other horror the U.S. has confronted in its 238 years of existence. Such addendums to the Fifth were unnecessary, because in the beautiful preciseness of Lincoln’s phrasing at Gettysburg, ours is “a government of the people, by the people, for the people,” one made up of us, beholden to us, and whose purpose is to serve us.

At the moment, we are threatened with a return to a pre-Constitutional situation that Americans would once have dismissed out of hand, a society in which the head of state can take a citizen’s life on his own say-so.

The question is: How far will post-Constitutional America stray from the nation so conceived in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights? In the 21st century, the midnight knock on the door may come not from the King’s men, but from the sky.

U.S. State Department veteran PETER VAN BUREN is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.