Holder Sings "Da-Do-Rand-Rand"

Not so fast.  The always swell Amy Davidson at The New Yorker still has questions after the AG wrote to bleary-eyed Rand Paul this morning that the Chief does NOT have the authority to launch a weaponized drone against Jane Fonda or anyone else not "in combat."

Parsers will wonder why Holder specified a “weaponized drone,” and if other means have a different legal status. That might be a question for the future attorneys general who look at the discussions of their predecessors for guidance. (That is a slightly mortifying thought.) It seems more likely that Holder, as he writes “weaponized drones,” is rhetorically rolling his eyes, and trying to make the question itself seem extreme—as if to say, Just look at what I have to put up with. If so, that is wrongheaded. Is it that Holder can't imagine using a drone in Ohio himself, and so can't see the precedents in the papers he passes around? Paul’s questions have been proper and necessary. This letter is a toehold of constitutionality, but it shouldn’t be the last one. There are all sorts of questions: about Americans abroad, what counts as combat, that six-thousand-page classified torture report, and even, perhaps, about the many people who have died in drone attacks who aren’t Americans at all.