What could go wrong?

The White House “kill list”–a regularly updated chart showing the world’s most wanted terrorists used by President Barack Obama during kill or capture debates–may soon be getting a rule book to go with it.

According to the New York Times, the administration–faced with the possibility that President Obama might lose the 2012 election to Mitt Romney–”accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures.” [emphasis mine]

Because if Obama’s unmitigated deadly policy fell in the hands of Republicans, it would be unacceptable.

Until now, President Obama has had the “final moral calculation” overseeing the “kill list,” the existence of which was first revealed in May in the wake of a drone strike that killed an al-Qaida leader.

But according to the paper, administration officials are looking to curb the power of the commander in chief with the rule book

What could possibly go wrong when the executive branch writes rules to govern the executive branch?  Perhaps not surprisingly, President Obama thinks this sort of “oversight” is a great idea:

“Creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons is going to be a challenge for me and my successors for some time to come,” President Obama said in an interview with author Mark Bowden for “The Finish,” a book on the killing of Osama bin Laden. “There’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems.”