Obama Administration Says President Can Use Lethal Force Against Americans on US Soil

[sofa king]

201. Please forgive my snippiness.

Allow me instead to point out that quotes and documented acts do not bolster the veracity of a prediction or a hypothetical situation; only time and results can do that. That is why I deliberately chose to write the post in the second person (past simple?).

But it wouldn't be a bad idea to offer some links to better define the situation as it exists.

First of all, the idea that this is somehow President Obama's or AG Holder's idea is rubbish. Here is Tom Daschle describing how, less than 100 hours after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration tried to ram through a last minute change in the Congressional authorization of use of force:

Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words "in the United States and" after "appropriate force" in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.

So what did the Bush Administration do? They spent the next six years using some of the nation's youngest and worst law graduates to re-interpret the powers of the executive branch, in order to allow them to freely act outside of the power or oversight of the Senate. That eventually culminated in the perpetual reference to the "unitary executive theory," which is how the Bush Administration escaped culpability for an unknown number of crimes and overextensions of authority.

(Bush's people weren't smart enough to come up with that on their own, by the way. Just as all of the other major woes of America today can be traced back to him, Saint Ronnie was the "unitary executive's" progenitor.)

The Bush Administration created a huge and largely secret volume of pseudo-legal and historical precedent, the known parts of which are potentially disastrous and dangerous, and quite obviously already have been disastrous in the past.

It is not enough for this President to simply ignore that legacy, for ignoring it merely allows it to lie dormant, and very deadly, allowing the next asshole who slithers in to mis-use it. Here is a visual metaphor of how Jeb Bush would utilize such a body of precedent, should he darken our door (caution: graphic violence). Imagine the object in the bathroom as the Bush legacy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ppjyB2MpxBU

Which returns us to the speculative part of my post above. This brilliant President has long since figured out that reason and moral clarity means nothing at all to Republican legislators. His prior actions show that the President gets more done by using Republicans' blanket opposition against themselves.

And what do you know? There's Rand Paul, doing his Jimmy Stewart imitation against this. The President and the Attorney General are using Republican opposition to get the gun out of the bathroom before Michael Corleone arrives, is what I think is happening. We shall certainly see.