Paul vs. Bipartisan Big Government

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Human Events:

Paul vs. Bipartisan Big Government

By: James Antle

3/13/2013 08:37 AM

 

It took Rand Paul thirteen hours—following months of letters and requests—to get an answer to a simple question. Did the Obama administration believe it had the authority to use drones to kill American citizens on U.S. soil?

 

Attorney General Eric Holder’s initial answer was a definite maybe. “The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront,” Holder wrote in a letter to Paul, suggesting it might take something like the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor for such a “hypothetical” to occur.

 

“Does the president want to bomb people in restaurants?” asked Sen. Carl Levin, the Democrat who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee. “No. I don’t think the president wants to.”

 

But the question isn’t what the president wants to do. The question was what the president had the legal authority to do.