New Orleans No matter what you think about guns and the right to own or carry them, most of us are clear that there should be some minimum requirements around their use and safety, before offering a license. It’s just common sense and provides security to people and the community. We may need that for future occupants of the White House.
Even if some might argue that my claim that “most of us are clear” on what should be involved in getting a gun license, all of us are clear, as is the law in the United States, that standing at an open window and pulling the trigger to kill a pedestrian walking down your block, even if he seems menacing, is murder pure and simple. If you didn’t have the good judgment to look before you leaped or tried to call the police, who are trained and tasked, to deal with this kind of issue, the law was clear that murder was murder.
These simple truths seem to be elusive to the US Justice Department. This has been a bad year for lawyers and their reputations. First, they went weak kneed under Trump’s bullying of some of the biggest, richest law firms in the country. Then there has been the parade of lawyers who have stood up for ethics and the rule of law, who are summarily fired as US Attorneys or Justice Department lawyers because they didn’t sufficiently kowtow to frivolous indictments on Trump’s revenge tour. Being on talk shows, podcasts, TV news, Trump’s personal legal team, or blond, seems to have been the clearest qualifications for appointment.
Nonetheless, having the department respond on why Trump’s extra juridical killings on the high seas are justified has disgraced the pretzel-like perversion of law and lawyers to new levels. The War Powers Act says that the government needs to get approval from Congress after “hostilities” have gone on for 60-days. In trying to rationalize that the Act doesn’t apply to Trump and these boat attacks, Trump’s lawyers claimed that none of this qualified because these were drone strikes and no American troops were in harm’s way. How is that not like the murderer shooting a stranger on the street from his window arguing it wasn’t murder because his victim wasn’t armed, therefore there were no hostilities and he was not in harm’s way?
The real point is that none of this legal doublespeak answers the real questions. Were these really drug dealers? Was it really legal to claim they were terrorists, even if they were drug deals as a justification? Why were these boats and their crews not captured and taken to trail to face the consequences, if there were any? Why were they just summarily killed reminiscent of the way the former president of the Philippines had thousands of alleged drug dealers or users killed without arrest or trial? There have been bipartisan requests for answers to these questions, but they have been ignored.
In fact, when several survived one US attack, rather than bringing them in, the US simply sent them back to their home country. The president of Columbia had the temerity to protest that a simple fisherman and a native of his country had been killed in a strike, and Trump went off at the protest, and threatened tariffs and sanctions. What the heck is going on? Add to that the fact that there were so many press reports that reminded the administration that most drug routes were not moving through the Atlantic corridors, so he had to move some of the strikes to the Pacific, underlining how much this is simply about provocations and threats to Venezuela, rather than having anything to do with drugs.
If anyone tried any of these stunts with American boats or citizens, we would probably have to stop Trump from going nuclear. A president shouldn’t be trigger-happy and bloodthirsty. Just because the US has more military strength than some smaller countries doesn’t empower our lawyers to argue that anything we do to a lesser power can be rationalized.
As a former ACORN leader always reminded, “a rationalization is nothing but a lie in the skin of a reason.”