Trump administration bombs another Venezuelan boat without legal authority

This is what happens when you know Congress and the Supreme Court are your cat’s paw:

President Donald Trump said Monday that he ordered another military strike against a boat that he insists was carrying illegal drugs from Venezuela to the U.S., telling reporters the operation left three people dead and “big bags of cocaine and fentanyl” floating around in the ocean.

“The Strike resulted in 3 male terrorists killed in action,” he wrote in a social media post. “No U.S. Forces were harmed in this Strike. BE WARNED — IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!”

The strike was the second of its kind in less than two weeks in what appears to be an unprecedented use of lethal military force against a criminal enterprise. In the past, the U.S. government has relied on the U.S. Coast Guard and law enforcement personnel to board vessels for inspection, much as it did on Friday.

But earlier this year, Trump insisted that drug cartels should be in the same legal category as foreign terrorist organizations, paving the way for the kind of lethal military force reserved under the law to prevent an imminent kinetic attack against Americans.

Critics of his administration have questioned this legal justification and whether it amounts to a war crime. While much of the pushback came from Democrats, Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul said he disagreed with Vice President J.D. Vance that it was a noble use of the military.

While it’s not as big a deal, the fact that journalistic conventions prevent reporters from just pointing out that it is not within the president’s authority to just launch a war on an organizations without any authorization from the legislature.

And the administration isn’t even really pretending otherwise:

The Trump administration has deemed several Latin American criminal gangs and drug cartels to be “terrorist” organizations — a move that broke new ground since they are motivated by illicit profit rather than ideological goals. On that contested basis, he and his aides have taken to referring to suspected drug smugglers as “narco-terrorists.”

In an interview with Newsmax released on Monday, Mr. Trump’s top counterterrorism adviser, Sebastian Gorka, said that obtaining congressional authorization to use armed force against drug cartels was not possible because they are not nation-states. He did not explain why Congress was able to do that when it authorized armed force against Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

So, the closest the administration has come to justifying these attacks are 1)to claim it’s impossible for Congress to do something it has done and is doing, and 2)to invoke the legally meaningless term “narcoterrorist.” Which ain’t that close at all. But “almost nobody cares about this stuff if a Democrat isn’t in the White House” is a pretty safe bet nonetheless.