Joe Scarborough slammed Republican lawmakers for their continued silence after the Trump administration said it struck yet another alleged drug boat in the Caribbean.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said that he ordered the U.S. military to blow up a small boat, which he accused of trafficking narcotics off the coast of Venezuela. The strike killed six people.
The strike was the fifth known use of deadly military force on a civilian vessel in the region since September. In a letter to Congress this month, the administration notified lawmakers it considered the U.S. in “armed conflict” with drug cartels and said it would treat suspected smugglers for the groups as “unlawful combatants.”
However, the administration has not provided any public evidence to support its claim that those vessels were trafficking drugs.
While some elected Republicans, like Sen. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, have publicly condemned the military actions, the majority of the president’s party has refused to do so. On Wednesday’s “Morning Joe,” Scarborough accused those lawmakers of betraying the Constitution and their oversight duties by blindly standing by the Trump administration.
“We have no idea who these people are who are getting killed,” Scarborough said. “These are extrajudicial killings.”
Scarborough said lawmakers should not be taking this administration at its word and noted how, despite its claim that it was only deporting gang members and violent criminals to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, a vast majority of those it sent had not been convicted of crimes.
“The White House kept telling us, ‘These are all gang members’ … We found out so many of those people that they just rounded up off the streets were not gang members,” he said.
Scarborough, who represented Florida in the House as a Republican from 1994 to 2001, said he could not imagine his colleagues at the time standing by and allowing the Trump administration to continue these strikes without the consultation of Congress. “I’ll tell you, the old chairman that I worked for on the Hill — that chairman of the Armed Services Committee — would not be so weak if things like this were happening,” he said. “They wouldn’t care who the president was,” he added. “They wouldn’t care who the Sec. Def. was, they would call them before the committee, and they would do their constitutional duty — and that is, they would provide oversight.” “Where are these men? Where are these women on Capitol Hill?” he asked. Scarborough said this wasn’t about partisan politics but about the duties enumerated to Congress in the Constitution. “We’re not asking you to embrace ‘narco-terrorists. We’re asking you to follow the Constitution,” he said, pleading with lawmakers to “call them to the Hill and get answers — not because you don’t like the administration, not because you’re not being loyal to Donald Trump, but because you’re being faithful to the Constitution. And you need answers.” You can watch Scarborough’s full remarks in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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