Two Republican Senators, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined the entire Democratic Caucus minus John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, to vote on Oct. 8 in favor of a War Powers resolution requiring the Trump administration to seek Congressional authorization for its declared policy of deploying the U.S. military against drug cartels designated as terrorist organizations.
The Trump policy, justified by a secret legal opinion which the administration refuses to provide to the U.S. Congress, goes hand-in-hand with the administration’s wild designation of the Venezuelan government itself as a drug cartel, headed by its President Nicolás Maduro. So far, four fishing and speed boats, which the U.S. administration claims were Venezuelan drug traffickers, have already been blown up in the Caribbean by the U.S. military, killing everyone onboard, while the door has been opened wide for U.S. military intervention into Venezuela itself.
The resolution was defeated 48-51, but not all the Republicans who voted against it did so because they approve of this policy. Sen. Todd Young, for one, wrote that while he voted against it because its wording was too broad: “I am highly concerned about the legality of recent strikes in the Caribbean and the trajectory of military operations without congressional approval or debate and the support of the American people.”
Senator Paul, characteristically, has been among the most outspoken against this unconstitutional policy. “The Constitution Does Not Allow the President To Unilaterally Blow Suspected Drug Smugglers to Smithereens,” he argues in a hard-hitting article published Oct. 8 in the online journal Reason, worth reading in full.
