President Donald Trump (R) authorized the US Navy to destroy a drug smuggling boat in international Caribbean Sea waters. The Left and their Party politicians are in an uproar. Trump has said that the drug smuggler was a threat to national security.

But that claim was sharply disputed by legal experts and some lawmakers, who said that Trump exceeded his legal authority by using lethal military force against a target that posed no direct danger to the US and doing so without congressional authorization.

Last bit first: Trump—any President—has constitutional authority to address threats to our nation’s security, including using lethal force. That’s at the core of the President’s job.

Then there’s this from Frank Kendall, ex-Biden SecAF:

The casualties “weren’t engaged in anything like a direct attack on the United States….” “Frankly, I can’t see how this can be considered anything other than a nonjudicial killing outside the boundaries of domestic and international law.”

The bit about the drug smuggling boat being no danger to the US is, at best, disingenuous in the present environment. That environment consists of drugs being smuggled into our nation on the scale it is, the movement of particularly lethal drugs like fentanyl and their precursors (the latter sourced from an enemy nation) into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico and Venezuela (among other receiving nations), and the resulting scale of American deaths directly from those drugs and indirectly from the smuggling operations. To insist that a single smuggling boat is no threat to our national security is akin to insisting that a single enemy combat ship in the course of a different type of ongoing conflict is no particular national threat and so, don’t worry about it, we shouldn’t sink it.