This is an excellent article.

Machiavelli said that no matter how good of a person a prince may want to be, because your opponent gains great advantage from acting immorally, you too must be able to act immorally. Unfortunately, the American Prince is the Constitution, a moral document, so it cannot stoop morally because that is its authority. The answer is "and defeat them using the criminal justice system and the coercive apparatus of the state". The law must be defended with a brutality that would be familiar to medieval warlords.