Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) slams Trump’s Pacific drug-trafficking strikes—five deaths, no congressional approval—as unconstitutional and potentially a Venezuela regime-change pretext, citing stretched 2001 AUMF justifying attacks on 24 narco groups. He condemns "double-tap" strikes (September) targeting survivors and the August 5th executive order’s secrecy, warning Trump’s expansion of presidential power risks undermining global and domestic rule of law, with legal battles likely ahead to restore constitutional limits. [Automatically generated summary]
Kevin Sebette is the president and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the author of the book, One Nation Under the Influence, America's Drug Habit, and How We Can Overcome It.
Kevin Sebette, thank you for the conversation this morning.
And look, there's been a long history in this country of presidents using their authority as commander-in-chief, combined with their inherent right of self-defense, which has been interpreted from the sec, sorry, Article 2 of the Constitution for the president.
And we've done a lot of things over, gosh, centuries.
But what's different about this is normally those conflicts, many cases, they have had some kind of congressional authority.
You had the Gulf of Plunken resolution for Vietnam.
You had the UA, sorry, the AUMF after 9-11.
This time, there is no congressional authorization whatsoever.
And second, conflicts that have been done without congressional authorization, Panama, Grenada, Libya, have always been very confined in their goals and short in duration, usually less than a month, two months at the most.
President Trump has taken us into an endless conflict with drug narratives, with the narcoterists, as he calls them, in Venezuela without any congressional approval.
And frankly, also without an adequate explanation.
We've had some classified briefs.
They waited a couple of months before they actually even started briefing Congress in a classified setting.
We have not had the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State come before the appropriate Congressional Committee, Armed Services or Foreign Affairs, and said, this is what we're doing.
This is why we're doing it.
This is where it's going.
And then to be questioned by the people's representatives.
Okay, where is it really going?
There's been no effort to do that.
So I think this significantly undermines our Constitution is a massive expansion of presidential power.
Basically, what the president has decided is that we are now going to have the death penalty for drug traffickers.
But further, not only are we going to have the death penalty, but Trump is going to be judge, jury, and executioner.
He's not going to have to show any evidence or probable cause.
He's going to make the decision and he's going to start killing people.
That, again, is a massive expansion of presidential power.
Now, I think there's a lot of concern in Congress that those past AUMFs that we have passed, even going back to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, have been taken by the president and then used in a massive and very broad way.
So there's a reluctance in Congress to give that authority.
But I really want people to understand that what Trump is doing with his presidency, and this is true in domestic policy as well as foreign policy, is he is day in and day out undermining the rule of law.
He is doing what he wants to do regardless of the Constitution.
He's not spending money as Congress intended.
He is spending money wherever he wants without congressional approval.
He's sending troops into U.S. cities.
He's slapping tariffs that are supposed to be the purview of Congress.
And I think the problem here is people tend to say, oh, well, come on.
Everybody sort of colors outside the lines a little bit.
You say the rule of law, international rules-based order, but there's all kinds of times when people go outside that.
And that's true.
But by and large, every president we've had and every Congress we've had has recognized that that law matters.
They've had arguments about what it means, how to interpret it, when they've gone over the line when they haven't.
This president, you know, and sorry, it's early in the morning.
I'm trying not to swear.
This president has a way of saying, yeah, to hell with you.
I don't care what the law is.
I'm doing what I want to do, and you all just have to eat it.
And that is a significant change in how we are supposed to govern ourselves, both in terms of domestic policy, but also international law.
The chairs and rankings got a briefing from Admiral Bradley.
Admiral Bradley is the one who has briefed us.
He is the, well, he's now the Special Operations Command Commander.
At the time of these strikes in September, he was the JSOC commander, Joint Special Operations Command, which oversaw and is still overseeing the strikes in Latin America.
So he briefed first the four of us, and then he briefed the full Armed Services Committees, both House and Senate, two days ago now.
Well, I mean, the main focus of it, well, it's two focus.
One, the so-called double-tap strike on September 2nd, and then the entire operation.
And what is the legal justification for the entire operation, which you have to really walk into the weeds to understand what their justification is.
But basically, overall, they're trying to connect it to the al-Qaeda fight and the ISIS fight, the AUMF that I referenced a few minutes ago, and we gave the authority to do that.
And they say, okay, we designated terrorist groups in the 2001 AUMF, and then the president was able to go after them and their affiliates.
So now we've decided that there are 24 narco-terrorist groups, and they are treated just like al-Qaeda, and therefore you can kill anyone associated with them, sorry, part of them or affiliated with them.
And then also the drugs are sort of their weapon.
So if they're close to the drugs, you can destroy those and kill the people.
Now, the difference is multiple.
One, no congressional authorization.
Admiral Bradley has said many times that he has ordered hundreds, almost a thousand of these strikes of one kind or another, so he knows what he's doing, and he does.
But he always had congressional authority.
He does not now.
This is simply what the president said.
And second, you have to ask yourself the question, is Osama bin Laden plotting actively to kill as many Americans as he possibly can, flying planes into buildings, whatever method he can.
Is that the same as people trying to sell cocaine in America?
I don't think it's the same.
Obviously, drug abuse is a major problem in the U.S.
But if you expand the president's authority to that degree, again, anyone selling narcotics is now a legit target for the president to kill without any probable cause.
I mean, that's a massive expansion of presidential power that is going to undermine our rights.
And let's also remember that fentanyl is the biggest killer in America.
There's no fentanyl involved here.
You know, Venezuela, it's all cocaine and marijuana to some extent.
Second, most of the boats that they've been striking, according to our intelligence, are headed to West Africa and then Europe.
So they're not even coming to the U.S.
I mean, it's one thing to say Anwar al-Waki was a guy who was plotting attacks out of Yemen.
He put bombs on a couple of, I think it was a FedEx and a UPS plane that were discovered and taken off.
I mean, he's putting a bomb on a plane that's going to blow up over a U.S. city with a bunch of people on it and kill a bunch of people.
Is that the same as 11 people working for a drug trafficker shipping cocaine to a transshipment point to be sent God knows where?
Is that so serious that we need to let the president of the United States use the military to kill people?
And look, al-Qaeda affiliates are still out there.
It's metastasized a great deal in the last 24 years.
ISIS screw up.
I mentioned Alwaki.
He was part of a thing called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on Yemen, al-Shabaab in Somalia.
You've got a variety of different Islamic Islamist terrorist groups in West Africa.
And it's still being used as an authority to hit terrorists.
Now, they've tried to narrow that down to say we're going after the really big threats, the transnational people who are directly threatening the U.S. are or U.S. interests.
Massive acquisition reform is contained in that bill, which was the most important part of it.
And we did not directly deal with it, except we did fence Secretary Hags' travel budget until he releases the information on those strikes.
All the videos, all of the legal justifications.
They haven't even given us the execute order, which was issued on August 5th, which was the direction to the Secretary of Defense: here's what you do on this campaign.
We haven't seen it.
And that's the rules of engagement.
That factors into, and sorry, I didn't get into the details of the double-tap strike.
We can do that during the questions.
That factors into the decision that Admiral Bradley made to do a second strike on two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the boat that had been hit by the first strike.
What was the reason for that?
That's contained in the execute order, which they haven't given us.
So that was in the bill to require them to turn that information over to Congress.
Yeah, well, you remember the part I said about how Trump doesn't think he has to follow the law that he doesn't want to follow?
I tend to think it means that he's not going to follow the law that he doesn't want to follow, and we're going to have to try to figure out some way to sue him and hope that the court finally decides that the rule of law does, in fact, matter more than Trump being able to do whatever he wants to do.