In the latest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson quotes from an editorial in Defense One by Jon Duffy, a retired Navy captain:
Examining the administration's strike against a small vessel in the Caribbean last week, Duffy warned that “[t]he United States has crossed a dangerous line” into “lawless power,” operating without regard to the law.
Duffy reminded readers of the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling in Donald J. Trump v. United States that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed while exercising official duties. At the time, he notes, experts warned that the decision would “give the commander-in-chief license to commit murder,” but a majority of the court waved those concerns away. “Now,” he writes, “the president has ordered killings in international waters. Eleven people are dead, not through due process but by fiat. The defense secretary boasts about it on television. And the president will face no consequences.”
“This is no longer abstract,” Duffy writes. “The law has been rewritten in real time: a president can kill, and there is no recourse. That is not strength. That is authoritarianism.”
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