Previous posts have discussed presidential decisions to kill suspected terrorists. (See NYT story on the "kill list.")
The president appears to be pushing regime change in Venezuela, and yesterday confirmed a big NYT scoop that he’s authorised CIA activity in the country. And after deadly strikes on six Venezuelan ships in the Caribbean he says were drug smugglers, Trump is now considering mainland targets. “We are certainly looking at land [strikes] now,” Trump said. “We’ve got the sea very well under control.”
In 2013, Sen. Rand Paul filibustered against drone strikes.
Jake Romm puts the dilemma of whom to designate as a terrorist into sharp relief: "The hollowness and malleability of the term [terrorism] means that it can be applied to groups regardless of their actual conduct and regardless of their actual ideology. It admits only a circular definition…that a terrorist is someone who carries out terrorist acts, and a terrorist act is violence carried out by a terrorist. Conversely, if someone is killed, it is because they are a terrorist, because to be a terrorist means to be killable."
Few independent legal scholars argue the strikes are legal. Even John Yoo—a former deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, who infamously authored the Bush administration's legal justification for "enhanced interrogation techniques"—has criticized the Trump administration's justification for the strikes, saying: "There has to be a line between crime and war. We can't just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime."
Jon Duffy, a retired Navy Captain, eloquently summarizes our current moment: "A republic that allows its leaders to kill without law, to wage war without strategy, and to deploy troops without limit is a republic in deep peril. Congress will not stop it. The courts will not stop it. That leaves those sworn not to a man, but to the Constitution."
Congress must not allow the executive branch to become judge, jury, and executioner. President Thomas Jefferson understood the framers' intention that the president defer to Congress on matters of offensive war. That's why Jefferson, when faced with the belligerence of the Barbary pirates in 1801, recognized that he was "unauthorized by the Constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense."
Jefferson wanted the authority to act offensively against the pirates, but he respected the intentional checks placed on the executive within the Constitution. Only after Congress passed an "Act for the Protection of Commerce and Seamen of the United States, against the Tripolitan Cruisers" in February 1802, did he order offensive naval operations. If the Trump administration wants to use military power, it should seek authorization from Congress. And Congress must have the courage as the people's representatives to reassert its constitutional duty to decide matters of war and peace.
