This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 13th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

On what basis did the President of the United States order the killing of a top Iranian general

Pido's Gene Healy discusses the fallout and the various legal claims of authority now

emanating from the White House. It's not exactly clear.

They're supposed to, the administration gave the notice that's required under the War Powers

resolution on last Saturday and that's supposed to include the statement of the legal

authority legislative and constitutional authority that they claim to be relying on. But that notification, someone

unusually, was classified. The document is available only to Congress. So even the legal theory in that document is it's

kind of on a need to know basis and we the public don't need to know right now.

To the extent they've made any public argument about it,

there's a last week the President's National security advisor at a press conference did some gesticulating in the direction of he mentioned the 2002 Aum, that's the authorization for the use of military force that was passed by Congress before the Iraq war,

and did some hand waving toward the president's quote constitutional authorities as

commander-in-chief to defend our nation. And you know it's not clear how far they think these powers extend. On Wednesday, I put up a blog post where I was, I asked whether the Trump administration's legal theory would allow them to order a hit on the Iatollah, you know, under the same theory.

He's, he's the Supreme leader of Iran is in the chain, the military chain of

command. In fact, there were reports that General Solemani had a meeting set up with him to talk about responses to the US in the region.

So under this logic that says you can take out an enemy general top you know a top regime official in a country

we're not at war with you know could you under the Trump theory, you know, launch a decapitation strike at the whole

Iranian regime and call it self-defense. Well, later that day, the day I put that blog post

to asking that question, question of Senator Mike Lee

comes that came out of a closed-door briefing with the Trump national security

officials and gave a press conference.

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