Cruz and Paul introduce a bill.
Meanwhile, Holder answers Paul's question:
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney quoted from the letter that Holder sent to Paul today. “Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on an American soil?” Holder wrote, per Carney. “The answer is no.”So then, all agree.
Or... I don't know. McCain and Graham seem to have suffered a narcissistic injury:
"So we've done a, I think, a disservice to a lot Americans by making them believe that somehow they're in danger from their government," McCain said. "They're not. But we are in danger. We are in danger from a dedicated, longstanding, easily replaceable leadership enemy that is hellbent on our destruction. And this leads us to having to do things that perhaps we haven't had to do in other more conventional wars."...It's so hard to see these young twerps getting attention. The elders should run the show.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) [said] "Noncombatants under the law of war are protected, not subject to being killed randomly. So to suggest that the president won't answer that question somehow legitimizes that the drone program is going to result in being used against anybody in a room having a cup of coffee, to me, cheapens the debate."
Hey, remember when the NYT presented Obama as cool — with his "kill list"?
Paul flipped it.
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38 comments:
A perfect example why there should be term limits, or mandatory retirement age, something, anything, just clear out the old guard who are more concerned with preserving their power.
The fact that it will never happen is depressing.
The President has the constitutional authority no matter what Holder agreed. Holder isn't the type to uphold the Constitution, nor is Obama.
A law by Congress can't restrict the President's authority, either.
Is this hard?
Congress's check and balance of this Presidential authority is the impeachment and removal power.
The details of when the President may exercise the authority without being impeached and removed depends on the circumstances, which is how the Constitutional matter stands.
Common sense is left as the determining factor.
These guys want to eliminate common sense and substitute a bureaucracy, in one of the rare places where common sense survives.
Noncombatants under the law of war are protected, not subject to being killed randomly
Sooo what aboiut the 16 year old son of one of the Anerican terroist dudes, who was sitting in some tea stall?
Now granted, he may have bben there hanging out where there were bad dudes (were they targeted?)or something. (He slipped out of grandpa's house that night.)
But was he an imminent threat?
Ooooh, cool.
Commandante Zero's losing big on this one.
Even Eric The Red's bailed.
And I think Brew Master is dead on.
Rand done goooooooood.
You know I am finding it harder and harder to tell which one is Lindsey Graham and which one is Lindsey Lohan.
Aren't they both lesbians?
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
What on earth does it have to do with the law of war?
It has nothing to do with the law of war. According to the "law of war", or at least according to what we DO... we most certainly can drop a hellfire missile on a target who isn't "imminently" doing anything at all. What is a combatant? In a war, certainly, you can kill combatants that aren't presently combating, don't see you, and don't know you're coming.
You (we, whatever, the US) can't do that to a criminal that is not actually, at the time, trying to kill someone. We can't do that to a terrorist on our own soil who is not in the act of terrorizing. We shouldn't do it to an enemy combatant overseas that is a US citizen without first affording that citizen due process.
Lindsey Graham is a moron.
We can *absolutely* kill an enemy while he has his coffee... when we're AT WAR.
Did I miss something and Rand Paul was filibustering over using drones in Afghanistan?
Looks like the squishy senators Graham and McCain are back for more squishy.
Lindsey Graham is one who'd give John McCain a blow job - for free.
Lohan would probably want a Porsche.
Noncombatants under the law of war are protected
Another person who doesn't get it.
A "combatant" is anyone the President says is a combatant; that's been the standard for the last decade or so. So saying "noncombatants are protected" is the same as saying "the President will only kill the people he says should be killed".
Which is how the CIA can claim with a straight face that its drone attacks have killed 0 non-combatants over the past few years, even though women and children who had never picked up a weapon were among the dead.
Sen. Paul scores!
Not only on policy; he won a battle with the Obama White House--something most of the inept GOP can't manage to do. He also did himself a lot of good for 2016.
Congress's check and balance of this Presidential authority is the impeachment and removal power.
Yeah, you made that claim earlier. It didn't make sense then, either.
Congress may only impeach the President for criminal actions. If the President has the authority to do something, Congress is Constitutionally forbidden from impeaching him for doing it.
Thus the argument that Congress can impeach the President for killing US citizens is, itself, a concession that it is criminal for the President to do that.
No, no, Revenant,
Congress may impeach the president for anything they decide amounts to "high crime and misdemeanors."
There is nothing to hold them to just things punishable under criminal statutes.
The FBI, ATF and others murdered unarmed woman and children at "Ruby Ridge" and "Waco" claiming they were in armed opposition.
I think Holder's response was dictated for him from the White House.
Hagar:
Yup. And I think it was an unpleasant discussion.
Another dividend from this supposedly pointless stunt: in another thread, our genial hostess highlights how this has discomfited Democrats who are not being asked, why weren't you there?
I think Mr. Paul is going to get a lot of mileage out of this.
I would do Rand Paul and I usually hate southern accents.
I bet he has a decent cut white hog.
The hair needs some work though.
tits.
There's a difficult question here, although it isn't the one that Paul or Holder is addressing.
OF COURSE we can kill our enemies, wherever they are, and whatever their citizenship.
The difficulty is that in the kind of war we are in, our enemies don't identify themselves by wearing uniforms or even being associated with countries. We and our allies killed huge numbers of Germans in WW II, and that was justified because we were at war with that nation, so we could kill not only the ones wearing the German uniform, but also the civilians who had the bad luck to work in or live near industrial facilities that we thought aided the German war effort.
In the Terror War, how do we know that X is an enemy engaged in war against us? He/she doesn't wear a uniform, and isn't necessarily located on "enemy" territory. If he or she is an enemy, I don't want him/her to be protected from attack because his/her status is surreptitious. But I would like our Government to assure us that that they take serious efforts to identify whether the potential targets, wherever located, are indeed the enemy.
The Attorney General (even if he were someone for whom I could have respect) is not the person to make that judgment.
Congress may impeach the president for anything they decide amounts to "high crime and misdemeanors." There is nothing to hold them to just things punishable under criminal statutes.
I concede they CAN impeach him, they just can't do so constitutionally. When you get right down to it, the Constitution doesn't do much to stop any of the three branches of government from ignoring it.
"High crimes and misdemeanors" is not secret Founder code for "any reason Congress wants". It refers to actual violations of law (constitutional, statutory, common, whatever). If the intent and understanding had been that Congress could remove the President for any reason it saw fit, they would have left off the limiting clause.
What I want to know is, exactly who is this "... dedicated, longstanding, easily replaceable leadership enemy that is hellbent on our destruction" that Senator McCain is talking about?
Rand did perform a needed service. He got the smallest written acknowledgement that the King in America is subject to laws and is not another 2 bit lawless one like the Nasty Obama sneering all of the time that he can do whenever he decides it's time to protect us like Castro and Chavez did to the oppressed Cuban and Venezuelan people.
And Mr McCain, how many drone strikes on civilian enemies of the state does it take to instill terror in citizens who "get his message?"
OF COURSE we can kill our enemies, wherever they are, and whatever their citizenship.
Well, no. Not legally, anyway.
For example, you're not allowed to bomb a military hospital under the theory that eventually the people in it will return to duty and start shooting at you again.
Also, WW2 makes for a bad example because in that we followed a doctrine of "total war". That hasn't been authorized for the war on terrorism and would be wildly inappropriate for it in any case.
Some of us advocate a war policy in which we defend America, we're defending a way of life, a set of values--we stand for something.
But as evidenced by many comments on this thread, and related ones, what America stands for can and should be sacrificed, salami-slice at a time.
At which point, it's far from clear what we're defending.
Not so fast folks. I would not put it past this cast of characters, if they thought it necessary, to parse Holder's response as meaning that there is presently no "authority" because the President has not asked for a legal opinion on the precise question Paul asked.
Dear Rand Paul: You keep using that word, "imminent". I do not think it means what you think it means.
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf
Per Justice Department White Paper:
"The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future”
I see nothing in Paul's bill, when combined with the Justice Department's definition of the word "imminent," to preclude a drone strike on an American in a cafe in San Francisco or in a restaurant in Houston.
"A law by Congress can't restrict the President's authority, either."
Actually, yes it can...if the law is enforced. The president is not a king, but a servant of the people. He is bound by the laws of the land as is everyone else. The president has no constitutional authority to murder Americans without due process.
Also, why this focus on drones? The president isn't claiming the right to kill Americans without due process by drone but the right to kill Americans without due process.
"The difficulty is that in the kind of war we are in...blah blah blah...In the Terror War...blah blah blah...blah."
The "Terror War," so-called, is bullshit, a lie foisted upon us by Washington to justify keeping the Cold War military expenditures going, to justify stripping away our freedoms and ratcheting up authoritarianism internally. In reality, "terrorism" is only a nuisance to us, and is not even a facsimile of an existential threat. The only real war happening is the war we're waging on others.
" It's so hard to see these young twerps getting attention. The elders should run the show.
It really hurts when you smack up against the realization that you just aren't relevant anymore.
Ha ha @ McCain and Graham and the rest of the RINOs old school establishment suck ups.
Robert Cook and I are on the same page on this one.
The government is systematically taking our freedoms and becoming more and more authoritarian. We are slowly losing our rights and like the frogs in the gradually warming hot water, we will one day find ourselves well and thoroughly cooked.
paul grandstanded and attacked a straw man. It was political theater only, he didn't get any concesion from the administration that they didn't already give. Because the administration was not planning on blowing somebody up in a Starbucks.
I'd be fully behind Paul if his assertion was to put the War on Terror back into the military category, but, like his dad, I see him having the same belief as his dad, albeit a bit more nuanced.
In other words, his attack was from the left, the same attack that would be made by Code Pink, and not from the right. Even though he's supposedly a man of the right.
Robert Cooke wrote:
The "Terror War," so-called, is bullshit, a lie foisted upon us by Washington to justify keeping the Cold War military expenditures going, to justify stripping away our freedoms and ratcheting up authoritarianism internally. In reality, "terrorism" is only a nuisance to us, and is not even a facsimile of an existential threat. The only real war happening is the war we're waging on others.
Standard boiler plate lefty and libertarian argument that has been made since forever. What else do you got? Sadly my guess is this is also Rand Pauls true position.
Until he says otherwise I won't vote for the guy.
Robert Cook wrote:
Actually, yes it can...if the law is enforced. The president is not a king, but a servant of the people. He is bound by the laws of the land as is everyone else. The president has no constitutional authority to murder Americans without due process.
How about in a war? How about in a Civil War?
FR Martin Fox wrote:
Some of us advocate a war policy in which we defend America, we're defending a way of life, a set of values--we stand for something.
But as evidenced by many comments on this thread, and related ones, what America stands for can and should be sacrificed, salami-slice at a time.
If we were facing, in America, the same thing that Israel is facing now, what would your position be on not just drone strikes but any sort of military action within the US?
How about a civil war? We have had one in the past.
WHat if an administration said they would be authorized to use a drone strike in a circumstance like a civil war?
"Standard boiler plate lefty and libertarian argument that has been made since forever."
That's because it's true.
"How about in a war? How about in a Civil War?"
Neither situation prevails right now.
If we're proposing extraordinary, extrajudicial, and extraconstitutional preemptive powers to the president just so he'll "be prepared" in the event of all possible extreme emergencies, why don't we simply declare that no laws apply to the office, that he is free to do with impunity anything he wants, to anyone at any time anywhere, at whim and with no checks of any kind. After all, a five year old in Kansas City might be a discipline problem to his parents, refusing to submit to their authority, indicating the potential he will grow up to make plots against the country or against the president. After all, if he's a malcontent at five, how crazed and dangerous might he be at 25? So, the president should be free to have that boy killed now to terminate the manifold possible injuries he could otherwise inflict on "the homeland."***
Isn't that reasonable?
***(I hate that fucking phrase. It's so Nazi-like, so close to "the fatherland.")
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