Trump Won’t Ask Congress for War Powers in Drug Cartel Fight

The Trump administration has dealt with drugs, not as a police question, but as a military one, and the president has not hesitated to use military action – despite the procedural objections of some Republicans – to crack down on the scourge of illicit fentanyl.

Without asking permission to strike at the cartels, the White House has kept Congress in the loop. A senior administration official told RCP that the administration has conducted seven separate classified briefings since early September with members and staff in both House and Senate leadership as well as the relevant committees.

This is a change, the official argued, from the way that previous presidents prosecuted the war against terrorists.

“The Trump administration has been much more forthcoming with the legal rationale behind these strikes than prior administrations,” the official said before pointing to the more than 500 drone strikes that the Obama administration conducted, “killing over 3,700 people, some of which were United States citizens, without offering any legal justification to Congress.”

The Pentagon has not yet reached those numbers. They have conducted at least nine air strikes on alleged cartel boats resulting in at least 37 deaths and the capture of two wounded drug runners now in U.S. custody. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth estimated that each boat destroyed amounts to 25,000 American lives saved.

Another difference: The strikes have come closer to home and in the Western Hemisphere, not in the faraway Middle East as part of the War on Terror. As part of that conflict, then-President George W. Bush requested and received a formal declaration of war from Congress in 2002. Subsequent administrations from both parties have relied on that authorization of military force to conduct strikes the world over.

What the administration now openly describes as “a war” may soon expand in scope. “The land is going to be next,” Trump said in reference to ground operations.

The opioid crisis has taken so many lives already, Trump told reporters gathered in the White House dining room, that it would be unlikely for lawmakers to object. “What are they going to do? Say, ‘Gee, we don’t want to stop drugs pouring in,’” he mused. “They’re killing 300,000 people a year.” Moments later in response to RCP questions, the president seemed to make up his mind on the spot.

“We’re going to go. I don’t see any loss in going” to Congress, Trump said as he turned to Hegseth. “We’re going to tell them what we’re going to do, and I think they’ll probably like it – except for the radical left lunatics.”

Sen. Todd Young does not fit into the latter category. The Indiana Republican is staunchly conservative in comparison to his Democratic colleagues. He also served nearly a decade in both the Navy and the Marines. And yet, Young has called on Congress to reassert its constitutional authorities.

“I think Congress needs to go further. Rather than just asserting our ability to authorize military force – which we certainly need to do – we also need to officially bring to close these conflicts and make clear that we have constitutional prerogatives that need to be consistently asserted,” Young told Axios on Wednesday.

A senior administration official told RCP that the Pentagon “is working through additional requests for information from the Hill and continues to make senior officials available to answer questions.”

There is little chance that Congress attempts to restrict the president in his war on the cartels. Republican leadership have shown little appetite for crossing the White House. Asked about the ongoing military campaign, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he has “questions” but remains in support of the effort.

Johnson told ABC News last week, “… I think most commonsense Americans look at that and say thank goodness. You take out one boat full of fentanyl, you save hundreds of thousands of American lives.”

Fentanyl remains the primary cause of U.S. drug overdose deaths, a tragic toll that includes more than 48,000 Americans who died from the drug just last year, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

“On the campaign trail, President Trump promised to take on the cartels – and he has taken unprecedented action to stop the scourge of narcoterrorism that has resulted in the needless deaths of innocent Americans,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told RCP.

“All of these decisive strikes have been against designated narcoterrorists, as affirmed by U.S. intelligence, bringing deadly poison to our shores, and the president will continue to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice,” she continued.

Trump was the first to call for deploying the military against the cartels. Ahead of the 2024 election, the Biden administration rejected the idea out of hand, preferring a traditional response of diplomatic and police action.

“Designating these cartels as [foreign terrorist organizations] would not grant us any additional authorities that we don’t really have at this time,” then-White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in March of 2023, adding that the United States already has “powerful sanctions authorities” and “we have not been afraid to use them.” Those tools did not, however, curb the flow of the drug.