1. United States
2. S.C.
3. Letter

The Constitution you swore to defend is not a partisan document. Your oath was not to a party or a president, but to the Constitution of the United States. That oath requires you, as a senator from South Carolina, to place meaningful limits on President Donald Trump’s use of executive power, regardless of political affiliation.Recent events show that our system of checks and balances is under serious strain. Federal judges have found that the administration has violated or defied clear court orders in immigration cases, including deportations carried out after courts ordered removals to be halted or reversed. When the executive branch can ignore court orders without consequence, the separation of powers that protects every American begins to crumble.At the same time, the administration has authorized lethal strikes on boats it claims are involved in drug trafficking, including follow up attacks that killed people already in the water after an initial strike. Legal and military experts, and some allies, have warned that these actions may violate international law and resemble extrajudicial killings rather than lawful enforcement. Treating suspects as targets instead of as people entitled to arrest and trial risks creating an undeclared, endless war that Congress never clearly authorized.Inside the United States, President Trump has deployed or attempted to deploy National Guard and other federal forces into American cities over the objections of state and local leaders. Presidential power to send in troops is supposed to be rare and tightly limited, not a routine tool to override local authority. Using troops this way is exactly the concentration of power the founders feared.These are not normal policy disagreements. Together, they show a pattern of an executive branch pushing, and sometimes crossing, the limits of lawful authority in multiple areas at once. In moments like this, Congress cannot be a bystander. Only active oversight and clear boundaries from you can restore the balance between the branches.Your duty is not simply to support a president from your party. Your duty is to protect the constitutional system that keeps any president from placing himself above the law. That means holding public hearings on defiance of court orders, demanding full explanations for these military actions, insisting that domestic troop deployments follow strict legal limits, and using your power over legislation and funding to block any operation that ignores the law.Party loyalty can never justify silence when the Constitution is at stake. Please use every power available to you to reassert Congress’s role as a coequal branch of government and to ensure that no president, including President Trump, has free rein to ignore the courts, bypass due process, or misuse military force. South Carolinians and all Americans need you to put the Constitution above party and show that the law still governs in the United States.