Sad to read: A prominent conservative legal commentator explains why Hegseth should be convicted on at least some of the charges.
"He also notes (correctly) that previous presidents have gotten away with similar initiations of war without congressional authorization."
"Yesterday, I wrote about why Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth deserves to be impeached and convicted for his role in in starting an unconstitutional war and perpetrating over 200 cases of outright murder with the "drug boat" strikes. Today GOP Rep. Thomas Massie filed impeachment charges in the House of Representatives. Even if they don't pass in the narrowly Republican-controlled lame duck Congress, they will almost certainly do so in the incoming Democratic one. Meanwhile prominent conservative legal commentator, national security law expert and former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has published an excellent overview of the charges in the National Review.
"McCarthy is far to my right, and far more sympathetic to the War on Drugs (I myself believe it should be abolished). Thus, it's notable that he and I agree that Hegseth should be convicted for his role in the drug boat strikes, which McCarthy characterizes as "indefensible":
I do not believe there is any viable justification for the extrajudicial killings by military force of operators of suspected drug boats. Drug trafficking is a crime, not an act of war. Our law addresses it through trial and imprisonment, not the use of military force…. The administration has not proved that the boats were ferrying narcotics, much less that the drugs were headed to the United States. The president's designation of Venezuelan criminal gangs as foreign terrorist organizations, besides being legally dubious (drug dealing is not "terrorist activity" as defined in federal law), does not authorize the use of force (it instead makes material support to the organization a crime and helps the government cut off funding sources). While the unauthorized killings in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have not drawn the level of public ire that the Iran war has, they are indefensible, and Hegseth has been their loudest, crudest champion." More,
Ilya Somin is Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, Professor of Law at George Mason University, Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, and author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter, and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain.
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