Andrew McCarthy to Rand Paul: "knock off the filibuster circus and stop making it harder to fight jihadists who are trying to kill our fellow Americans."

Andrew McCarthy reminds Rand Paul that

we are operating under a congressional authorization for the use of military force overwhelmingly enacted days after the 9/11 attacks and reaffirmed several times since. In the AUMF, lawmakers clearly left to the president’s judgment the determination of who fits the category of enemy against whom force is authorized.

If Senator Paul truly believes American citizens are unduly threatened, the constitutional path is clear: He should propose legislation repealing the AUMF. Without the AUMF, the laws of war would not be operative — at least in the absence of an attack or threatened attack on the United States. We would be back to a pre-9/11 state in which terrorism was strictly a law-enforcement matter. Senator Paul would then have his wish: It would be unlawful to target American citizens with lethal force. But . . . we would also no longer be permitted to conduct the military operations against jihadists that have prevented a reprise of 9/11.

If the senator, despite the utter dearth of substantiating evidence, really thinks the president is so likely to kill Americans capriciously that it is worth forfeiting our capacity to strike al-Qaeda militarily, he should say so. If he’s not willing to be accountable for this choice, however, he should knock off the filibuster circus and stop making it harder to fight jihadists who are trying to kill our fellow Americans.

Like his father before him, Senator Paul has a libertarian following, some of whom have convinced themselves that counterterrorism measures are more of a threat to our country than terrorism itself. In some ways, this is understandable. A dozen years ago, the average young adult’s formative experience was 9/11; today, it is the daily shredding of the Fourth Amendment at airports and public buildings, where political correctness has institutionalized unreasonable searches. But the fact that there has been excess in counterterrorism does not mean all counterterrorism is excessive. The use of lethal force authorized by Congress against our enemies on foreign soil is vital to our security, even if a few of those enemies hold American citizenship.

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