Ted Cruz Corners Eric Holder on Drone Strikes on American Soil

Say what you will about Senator Ted Cruz (and I say good things), he gets results.  After his celebrated deflation of Chuck Hagel during the confirmation hearings, he takes on Attorney General Eric Holder on the subject that has arisen out of Obama's drone strike program and its potential use inside the United States.  The questioning comes as a result of Holder's written reply to Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) in which Holder tries to have it both ways, stating that Obama "has no intention" of attacking American citizens inside the United States, but can anticipate that it could occur under an "extraordinary circumstance".  But Holder avoided answering Paul's original question about whether a president has the authority to order such a strike.
 

In the exchange with Cruz, Holder consistently tries to waffle and run out the clock (and it sounds like he keeps talking about "legal force"; the term is lethal force), but Cruz' rejoinders are timely and on-target, and simply won't let up until Holder has to agree to a simple answer to a simple postulate, or face the political backlash about his refusal to deny that the President has the authority to kill ('militarily execute' is the phrase we used in the service) an American citizen on American soil when that citizen does not pose an imminent threat.

Cruz posits his question no less than seven times, and Holder tries to side-step the answer by pondering about whether it would be "appropriate", using that legal term of art four times.  Cruz twice tells him that he doesn't care about its propriety, what he cares about is whether Holder will commit to an answer about its constitutionality, drawing out the word like it's a foreign concept so that Holder can have time to grasp its meaning.  Holder finally sputters "translate my 'appropriate' to 'no' …" when he realizes that he stands to lose more if he persists in his vein of tap dancing.

Keep it up, Senator.  You're doing just fine.