Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the Bureau of Land Management Relating to ``North Dakota Field Office Record of Decision and Approved Resource Management Plan''

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, somewhere off the coast of Venezuela a speed boat with 11 people on board is blown to smithereens. Vice President Vance announces that ``killing cartel members that poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.''

When challenged that killing citizens without due process is a war crime, the Vice President's response was that he ``didn't give a shit.''

Sometimes, in fits of anger, loud voices will say they don't care about the niceties such as due process. They just want to kill bad guys. For a brief moment, all of us share that anger and may even embrace revenge or retribution.

But over 20,000 people are murdered each year in the United States, and somehow we find a way to a dispassionate dispensation of justice that includes legal representation and a trial.

Why? Because sometimes the accused is actually not guilty. Even with the best of care, even with the best of justice, sometimes we find out it is the wrong person.

As passions subside, a civilized people should ask questions. To be clear, the people bombed to smithereens were guilty, right?

If anyone gave a you-know-what about justice, perhaps those in charge of deciding whom to kill might let us know their names, present proof of their guilt, show evidence of their crimes. The administration has maintained that the people that they blew to smithereens were members of a gang, members of Tren de Aragua, and therefore narcoterrorists.

Why? Because we say so.

But certainly, then, if they know that they belong to a particular gang, then someone must surely know their names before they were blown to smithereens. Is it too much to ask to know the names of those we kill before we kill them, to know what evidence exists of their guilt?

At the very least, the government should explain how the gang came to be labeled as ``terrorists.'' How did the people who you say are in a gang, how did they come to be labeled as a ``terrorist''?

U.S. law defines a terrorist as someone who uses premeditated, politically motivated violence against noncombatants.

Show us evidence of that. Show us evidence of their guilt. Show us evidence that they are terrorists, perhaps before we blow people to smithereens.

Since the U.S. policy is now to blow people to smithereens if they are suspected of being in a terrorist gang, then maybe someone should take the time to explain the evidence of their terrorism.

Critics of this whole terrorist-labeling charade, such as Matthew Petti at Reason, explained that, in practice, what we are doing in practice ``means that a `terrorist' is whoever the executive branch decides to label one.'' You are a terrorist because you are labeled one. You can be killed because you are called a terrorist.

But where in all of this is some sort of evidence that you are guilty of something?

While no law dictates such, once people are labeled as ``terrorists,'' they appear to be no longer eligible for any sort of due process--no, the blow-them-to-smithereens crowd, at this point, will loudly voice their opinion that people in international waters don't deserve due process.

Vice President Vance asserts:

There are people who are bringing--literal terrorists--who are bringing deadly drugs into our country.

Which, of course, raises the question: Who labeled them as ``terrorists''? And what is the evidence of these specific people who had names before they were blown to smithereens? What is the evidence against them individually? What are their names? What, specifically, shows their membership and guilt? Were they armed at the time they were blown to smithereens?

The blow-them-to-smithereens crowd also conveniently ignores the fact that death is, generally, not the penalty for drug smuggling.

The mindless trolls that occupy much of the internet whine that such questions show weakness or commiseration with drug pushers who are killing our children, a ludicrous assertion to most sentient humans but one I fear that requires a response: International law and norms have always granted due process to individuals on the high seas not actively involved in combat. U.S. maritime law explains in detail the level of force and the escalation of force allowed in the interdiction of drugs. You realize we interdict hundreds of ships off the shore of Miami, off the Pacific coast, and we don't always blow them to smithereens. Why? Because some of them don't actually have drugs on them. Hundreds of ships are stopped daily, yearly. The blow-them-to-smithereens crowd might stop to ponder that a good percentage of these ships that we actually search turn out not to be drug smugglers. Coast Guard statistics show that one in four interdiction finds no drugs.

So far, the administration has admitted to blowing up four boats suspected of drug smuggling. So there is a one-in-four chance, statistically speaking, that one of these boats may not have had any drugs on it. We will never know because they were blown to smithereens. We may never know the names of the people because they were blown to smithereens. We may never know whether they had arms because they were blown to smithereens.

It seems someone should ask, if the U.S. policy is to blow up all suspected ships, should that policy really be extolled as the ``highest and best use of our military?'' What an insult to our military.

Jake Romm puts the dilemma of whom to designate as a terrorist into sharp relief. Jake Romm writes:

The hollowness and malleability of the term [terrorism] means that it can be applied to groups regardless of their actual conduct and regardless of their actual ideology. It admits only a circular definition . . . that a terrorist is someone who carries out terrorist acts, and a terrorist act is violence carried out by a terrorist. Conversely, if someone is killed, it is because they are a terrorist, because to be a terrorist means to be killable.

It is a circular definition which no one ever bothers to say: Why are they a terrorist? What is their name? What are they guilty of? What have you accused them of?

We say just say: You are a terrorist; therefore, you are killable.

It devolves to madness.

Can you imagine a doctrine in which we just blow up ships off of Miami and say ``whoops'' if they didn't have any drugs on board? Twenty-five percent of the ships that we board currently don't have any drugs on them. It is a mistake. And we allow it because it is a search, and typically it is a voluntary search. But we allow searches. But we don't kill every suspected boat off of Miami suspected of having drugs because 25 percent of them don't have any drugs.

There is a shortage of independent legal scholars who argue that these strikes are legal. Even John Yoo, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General under George Bush who infamously offered the Bush administration's legal justification for waterboarding, has criticized the administration's justification for the strikes, saying:

There has to be a line between crime and war. We can't just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.

John Duffy, a retired Navy captain, eloquently summarizes our current moment:

A republic that allows its leaders to kill without law, to wage war without strategy, and to deploy troops without limit is a republic in deep peril. Congress will not stop it. The courts will not stop it. That leaves those sworn not to a man, but to the Constitution [to stop this].

Congress must not allow the executive branch to become judge, jury, and executioner.

Often, people will say: What about the Barbary pirates? What about the Barbary pirates? Jefferson went after them; it should be OK.

But Jefferson understood that the Framers' intention was that the President defer offensive war to Congress, to authorization.

So while there was always a justification and still is a justification for violent defensive maneuvers to protect your shipping, there was never an authorization for offensive unless approved.

This is why President Jefferson, when faced with the belligerence of the Barbary pirates in 1801, recognized that he was ``unauthorized by the Constitution'' only with the authorization of Congress ``to go beyond the line of defense.'' Jefferson wanted the authority to act defensively against the pirates, but he respected the intentional checks placed on the Executive within the Constitution. Only after Congress had passed the Act for the Protection of Commerce and Seamen of the United States Against the Tripolitan Cruisers in February 1802 did he change it from defensive maneuvers to protect the ships to offensive maneuvers.

Our history is prescient. If the Trump administration wants to use military power, they should seek authorization from Congress. There is a difference between war and peace. There is a difference in the rules of engagement. There has to be. Our police don't shoot people on sight. We have a process. Even off of the coast, we have a process.

We have longstanding maritime laws that we obey as well as every other civilized nation in the world obeys. We board ships after announcing who we are and that we are going to board the ship. There is an escalation if there are weapons fired, if there is a reason where the Coast Guard can escalate, but we don't just blow ships to smithereens.

The vote before us today offers every Member of this body an opportunity to reverse the decades-long abdication of this critical responsibility, of leaving this to the executive branch. Our Founding Fathers said Congress shall authorize war. The Executive is not authorized to do this.

I encourage my colleagues to support this resolution.

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