The president’s spurning of the War Powers Act is just his latest claim that he can wield deadly force outside the law.
Masked ICE agents seize law-abiding individuals on our cities’ streets. The U.S. military sinks defenseless boats on the high seas. At home and abroad, the administration has ever more brazenly embraced the proposition that they need no law to authorize their actions. The Trump administration believes it doesn’t need no badges.
And so the Washington Post reported Saturday that the Trump Justice Department has told Congress that the administration will continue its lethal strikes against boats with alleged drug traffickers aboard while ignoring the law requiring Congressional approval for ongoing hostilities.
You know what are, like, dead: The guardrails that protect the rule of law. The Trump administration won’t abide by congressional constraints on the use of military force abroad. It has been demolishing the internal guardrails in the executive branch against presidential lawlessness. And when you put all this together with the use of the military not just abroad but at home, we are well down the road to becoming—to use a term popular in the era of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—a banana republic.