In defending Obama's assassination policy, Attorney General Eric Holder uses the "greater-than-lesser" argument, that the power to do something substantial includes the power to do something less so, that
once Congress has given the president a broad grant to use military force against a particular enemy, the president [need not] go back to Congress to get new authorization to take actions that fit within the scope of that grant...
Ian Millhiser notes that any Post-Bush evaluation of the president's wartime powers must take account of the problem of John Yoo, [who's] theory that the power to kill an enemy combatant must also
include the power to do what you wish with him. Yoo posits:
The United States Code proscribes torture. Likewise, one of the most well established principles in American law -- stretching at least as far back as the Supreme Court's 1804 decision in Little v. Barreme -- is that Congress has the power to forbid the president from waging war in certain ways.
Ultimately, this may be the only answer for Americans who do not want their president to have the power to target other Americans.
