If a plane is about to fly into a building being piloted by a US citizen you guys think the president should or shouldn't do what exactly? Does the constitution give him power to act or not?
The President should be able to act. Thing is, without protections, legal precedents could be used to greatly expand the use.
I was just reading the history of the FBI. It started when Teddy Roosevelt was outraged by companies going around destroying our natural treasures with various types of pollution and destruction, and he had no one to gather the facts to prosecute them. Presidents historically had used private forces like Pinkerton detectives to go beat the heads of labor strikers when needed, until their abuses led Congress to ban the practice.
He asked Congress to approve money for a group of agents for investigating the issue, and Congress refused, saying they didn't want to create a 'state police force' that might lead to abuses. Roosevelt ordered his Attorney General to do it anyway and he waited until Congress was out of session and then reassigned some agents to make the new agency.
Those were the roots that came to lead to the agency that was threatening the life of Martin Luther King, and abusing the rights of citizens in operations like Cointelpro.
A drone strike is initially dscribed as 'the only practical option to kill an Al Queda leader', which a lot of people are favorable towards. Next thing you know, drones have killed over 4,000 people - not all of them are 'Al Queda leaders'. It sort of creeps to more and more and more people people killed with less justification for each. Where does it creep to next?
Congress' concerns about the FBI were ignored. Truman came to view the CIA he created as out of control and he was ignored. FDR wanted the Pentagon to be a temporary WWII building to avoid the miitary becoming too entrenched as a politically powerful interest influencing Congress and he was ignored.
As we're always increasing our surveillance technology, our satellite technology, our eavesdropping technology - remember Bush ignoring the constitution to approve warantless wiretaps - and now drone technology, there is an issue for the legal protections to keep up with the new challenges.
Do you want a US where drones routinely record everything going on, are routinely used to kill people who are considered a threat?
Outrageous? Legal protections were written in to approve use only in the case of 'imminent threat of attack'. Look how those protections were stretched to become meaningless by the released memo that definied 'imminent' as meaning 'no clear evidence of any threat, but we think they might be part of one years later'.
The UN Charter has a central legal protection against its signatories launching any wars, except in the case of a pre-emptive strike against an imminent threat, meant for when a country has an enemy on its borders with forces about to attack them - a restriction made meaningless for Bush to invade Iraq with an invented 'imminent threat' of Saddam about to attack the US.
It's a lot easier to get protections in place earlier than later. It wasn't so hard for the US to sign on to the 'non-militarization of space' in global treaties early in space exploration, while reverrsing that support decades later wanting military dominance in space and therefore over the planet.
Rand Paul is a horrible choice to play a role in this issue. But absent better leaders doing so, this is the sort of thing that happens.
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