Democrats and Republicans clashed on the Sunday show circuit over the Trump administration’s military strikes on boats in the Caribbean, with a Sept. 2 strike in particular becoming a focal point for the White House’s critics.
GOP lawmakers, with a few exceptions, have offered defenses of the ongoing attacks against vessels the administration says are carrying drugs bound for American streets.
No public evidence has been offered by the White House to support those claims, and the president is relying on the administration’s designation of drug cartels as terrorist organizations to justify the escalation of force against persons and groups previously dealt with by law enforcement means.
Drug trafficking remains a criminal offense and is not considered an act of war.
Democrats continue to argue that one strike that killed survivors of a primary U.S. attack who were reportedly attempting to cling to wreckage to stay alive may, in fact, constitute a war crime.
Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, used similar terms as he spoke on Sunday on ABC’s This Week about his experience viewing classified footage of the attack in a closed House briefing on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Sen. Adam Schiff, who sits on the Intelligence panel, called the strike “unconstitutional” and “morally repugnant” on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“It’s no different than any of the dozen-plus videos they’ve already released. It seems pretty clear they don’t want to release this video because they don’t want people to see it, because it’s very, very difficult to justify,” said the congressman.
“If they release the video, then everything that the Republicans are saying would clearly be betrayed to be completely false.”
Sen. Tom Cotton has been one of his fiercest defenders and was one of the Republicans who participated in the closed briefing on Thursday as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said on Sunday that he believed the strikes were legal under the president’s constitutional authority, though he mixed up which president was exercising that authority.
“I think President Bush has every power under the Constitution to strike boats in international waters,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press.
Cotton maintained that the survivors of the second strike on Sept. 2: “They were not incapacitated…They were sitting on that boat. They were clearly moving around on it.”
“It is a highly effective and efficient way to stop these drugs from reaching our shores,” said the senator.
Senior Democrats in Congress now largely accuse Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of being an unserious showman whose lack of a background in military command positions and general inexperience show as he attempts to manage the Pentagon’s bureaucracy.
The secretary was found by the Pentagon’s inspector general in a report that was made public last week to have put U.S. intelligence at risk when he shared it in an unclassified setting — a Signal group chat with other members of the administration, including the vice president, as well as a reporter added to the chat by mistake.
Hegseth has rejected their criticisms, but his allies on the hill found themselves answering or dodging questions from reporters after the report was made public regarding whether they had confidence in his leadership.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, one of the veterans who participated in the Democrats’ video message last month urging members of the military to defy illegal orders, gave her take during an appearance on State of the Union.
“Everything they’ve done has been illegal,” said Duckworth, calling the “double-tap” strike “essentially murder” carried out in international waters.
Asked to clarify by CNN’s Dana Bash, who wondered if Duckworth thought it was a war crime, the senator responded: “It is a war crime. It’s illegal– however you put it, it’s still illegal.”
Duckworth is a combat veteran who lost both of her legs in a 2004 helicopter crash after an RPG struck her Blackhawk during a mission in Iraq.
Several Republicans who have broken with the White House on other issues are among Hegseth’s critics, though, adding an air of bipartisanship to the frustrations around the Department of Defense under the former Fox News host, who has taken to referring to it as the “Department of War” without congressional approval.
Sen. Thom Tillis has called for whoever authorized the second strike against survivors on Sept. 2 to be thrown out of military command, saying: “If someone knowingly launched a second missile at that boat, which led to the deaths of the other two, then they have to be held accountable, and they shouldn’t be in whatever role they’re in.”
His colleague, Sen. Rand Paul, said that Hegseth was either “lying or incompetent” last week after the defense secretary claimed to have left the room before the second strike was ordered.
Paul added on Thursday: “I think he should testify under oath about the orders that were given, and I think that the video of the distressed, shipwrecked or incapacitated people on those boats being bombed, that video should be shown to every American.”
