Weeks after ordering the U.S. military to kill 17 people in boats off Venezuela, the Trump administration justified the much-criticized strikes by telling Congress this week it believes the United States is in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which—if not checked by Congress or the courts—would grant him “extraordinary wartime powers,” the New York Times reported Thursday.

Why it matters: “In an armed conflict, it is lawful to kill combatants for the opposing force on sight,” Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt write for the Times . And that means from the White House’s perspective, “the laws of war permitted it to kill, rather than arrest, the people on the boats because it said the targets were smuggling drugs for cartels it has designated as terrorists” because t

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