Executive Power, 2010 Edition
Transplanted Lawyer wonders where the outrage is over the recent claim by the Obama Administration that it has the authority to assassinate US citizens believed to be terrorist participants, noting that this is an even more remarkable assertion than anything Bush ever claimed. He further states:
“If we’re going to have an overt policy authorizing assassinations — and I can see that there are some good arguments for why we should — then we should do what we can to make that policy conform to our Constitutional ideals.”
That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
The emphasis is on “claimed”, as the underlying story specifies such “assassinations” were approved several times under Bush. Should we be surprised? The domestic police forces obviously have the right to kill US citizens and do so quite frequently. If we accept collateral damage as a necessary evil, at some point the victim will be a WASP and then we’ll have to seriously re-evaluate our policies.Report
If my government is going to have a policy of killing, like, whomever it wants, I’d hope it has the decency to keep such a policy double-secret.
Once it makes the policy official, we’ll have to deal with policy creep.Report
But certainly we can’t allow an assassinations gap.Report
Transplanted Lawyer: Where’s the outrage? How naive, dude.
It’s different for Democrats! Think FDR’s vacation facilities for Japanese-Americans during the war, Woodrow Wilson’s arrests of American citizens, Vietnam, Korea, and now Dear Leader’s $4 Trillion dollar daficet!Report
Of course it’s different for Democrats. Criticizing your own party (from the left) is considered disloyal, and hell will freeze over before Republicans oppose expansions of executive security powers. When Republicans are in the more left-wing Democrats are in a better position to get some press coverage of their criticism – but who bothers following Glenn Greenwald now? The media only cares about criticism from the right, whose only issue in this realm is that Obama hasn’t claimed enough unchecked executive power.Report
I was kind of wondering when one of you guys would mention this, glenn greenwald’s been fantastic on the subject and Conor calls them the Administration’s actual death panels which is both (and sadly) amusing and accurate.
(http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2010/02/04/assassinations/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+salon/greenwald+%28Glenn+Greenwald)Report
They just keep sliding farther down that slippery slope. It was only a matter of time before this claim was made.
Americans need to watch every single move their government makes, and demand retractions of statements such as this.Report
The GOP still calls Obama soft on terrorism, of course.Report
My answer has been to spend six years asking Republicans, “How will you feel when President Hillary Clinton claims these powers for her administration?” and now to ask the Democrats in my workplace, “How will you feel when President Jeb Bush claims these powers for his administration?”Report
How well has that worked?Report
Well, it’s succeeded in ending a number of conversations anyway.Report
LOL.Report