President Donald Trump's ramped-up hostilities with Venezuela drew a stern warning Friday from an unlikely source — the staunchly conservative National Review.
"It would be a colossal mistake for the president to glide listlessly into a war in South America for which he sought no public support or congressional buy-in," Noah Rothman, senior writer for the magazine, admonished Trump. "There is no legal basis for such an operation in the absence of an attack on U.S. assets or personnel.
"Despite the claims from Trump administration figures that it is executing strikes on terrorists, it is hard to imagine even a tendentious reading of either of the post-9/11 Authorizations for Use of Military Force that would find in them legal justification for treating either Venezuelan gangs or the regime’s agents as though they were al-Qaeda militants."
Trump intensified the assault against Venezuela today with the Pentagon reportedly deploying an aircraft carrier to the Caribbean in a significant escalation.
The National Review warning contrasted with the silence of Capitol Hill Republicans, who previously had resisted Trump's military impulses.
"GOP lawmakers who for years warned that Congress risked abandoning its constitutional right to decide whether the United States enters an armed conflict have now mostly gone silent as Trump directs unprecedented military action in Latin America," the Washington Post reported Friday. "Their deference has allowed the administration to escalate what many legal experts say is a campaign of extrajudicial killings."
“There never was a majority of us,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said of fellow Republicans who, in past administrations, were more willing to guard Congress’s authority, “but there were more.” In a brief interview at the Capitol, he suggested “one conclusion might be that they’re against emergencies when there’s a Democrat president but for emergencies when there’s a Republican president.”
