Democrats should know their whining about the legal basis for the drone strike on Qassem Soleimani is kind of pointless when even the New York Times has dismissed it.
The Times editorial board on Friday said that the “real question” to ask about the strike is “not whether it was justified, but whether it was wise.”
True.
This White House, picking up where President Barack Obama left off, says it had the authority for the attack because Soleimani posed an immediate threat to the United States and because Congress several years ago passed legislation allowing the president to act militarily in Iraq.
Yes, the Trump administration is taking a lot of liberties with its interpretation of the law. Obama did when he greatly expanded the use of targeted drone strikes against suspected terrorists, which has effectively been a run around capturing and trying them in court.
But we didn’t just take out Pope Francis. It was Soleimani, who the New York Times described as an “indisputably an enemy of the American people, a critical instrument of the Iranian theocracy’s influence across the Middle East and an architect of international terrorism responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and a great many others in the region, from Yemen to Syria.”
Soleimani may just not be the one worth getting into a constitutional debate over.
