Representative Seth Moulton is a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, but he learned about the U.S. military\u2019s middle-of-the-night capture of Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro the same way many Americans did: A friend who saw the news on the internet texted him.\u201cThat is not the way Congress is supposed to be notified of operations by the Department of Defense,\u201d Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told us wryly. Still, Moulton was surprised neither by the Trump administration\u2019s decision to attack Venezuela nor by the fact that it declined to give Congress a heads-up about the mission, much less seek its approval. A Marine who served four tours of duty in Iraq, Moulton had watched for months as the military stationed warships off Venezuela\u2019s coast, and he gave little credence to the insistence of senior administration officials, in classified briefings to lawmakers, that they were not planning to take out Maduro. \u201cI know what it means to be a Marine, sitting on a ship off the coast, and you\u2019re not there to interdict boats or conduct a naval blockade,\u201d he said. \u201cThose are ground troops. And so it was no mystery to me why they were there.\u201dThe president and his aides can lie to Congress with impunity, he argued, because the Republicans who run the House and Senate have shown they will do nothing about it. \u201cThis is the weakest Congress in American history,\u201d Moulton said, accusing Republican leaders of making a co-equal branch of the federal government \u201cessentially fade away.\u201dMoulton is running for a Senate seat, giving him even more reason than usual to criticize the GOP. But his views about Congress\u2019s self-diminishment are widely shared inside and outside the Capitol, and the facts are hard to dispute. In the first weeks after Donald Trump returned to the White House, top Republicans offered no protest as his administration flouted their constitutional authority over spending, shutting down agencies that Congress had authorized and funded. Now the same leaders are handing over Congress\u2019s power to authorize war-making without a fight. They\u2019ve hardly made a peep over a military attack in which the administration cut out even the senior-most lawmakers, who are customarily informed about major operations.Speaker Mike Johnson has praised the capture of Maduro and parroted the administration\u2019s argument that the mission amounted to a law-enforcement action rather than an act of war to oust a foreign leader. \u201cWe are not in a war in Venezuela,\u201d he told reporters today. \u201cIt is not a regime change. I want to emphasize that. It is a change of the actions of the regime.\u201d With rare exceptions, rank-and-file Republicans have offered similar support for the Venezuela mission. Some have joined Trump in denigrating Congress, echoing his assertion that congressional leaders couldn\u2019t be trusted with advance news about the operation. \u201cCongress is a sieve,\u201d Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee told us. \u201cI\u2019m glad that the president would forgo that formality.\u201dOther Republicans compared the Maduro mission to President George H. W. Bush\u2019s unilateral 1989 invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega and President Barack Obama\u2019s drone strikes on suspected terrorists in the Middle East. They also noted that the Biden administration put a $25 million bounty on Maduro\u2019s head. But as in so many other areas, Trump has pushed the boundary of executive power further than his predecessors. Representative Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, acknowledged that if Obama had, say, \u201cbombed Israel and not told us about it,\u201d the GOP would want to hold him accountable. But he said Congress\u2019s role in this case was simply to listen to the administration\u2019s briefings about Venezuela. \u201cI don\u2019t think any accountability is warranted here,\u201d Fine told us. \u201cI think the president did the right thing.\u201dFor a moment last fall, Congress showed some life. A group of Republicans joined Democrats to force the passage of legislation requiring the Justice Department to release its files on the convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, defying an aggressive push by both Trump and Johnson to kill the proposal. Similar bottom-up efforts have gained steam, including a bill that would extend health-insurance subsidies that expired last year. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California, an author of the Epstein bill, told us the legislation \u201cchanged the entire game. It\u2019s opened up a floodgate of Republicans willing to stand up to the president.\u201dStill, the administration isn\u2019t exactly demonstrating renewed deference to Congress. In addition to ignoring (and, according to Democrats, deliberately misleading) lawmakers on the Maduro operation, the administration has released only a small fraction of the required Epstein files, and those have come with heavy redactions. And the floodgates of Trump criticism end, apparently, at foreign and military policy\u2014an area where, Khanna acknowledged, Congress has been abdicating its responsibility for decades: \u201cI\u2019ve unfortunately not seen enough of a reaction against these strikes.\u201d[Read: \u2018They\u2019re delusional if they think this is going to go away\u2019 ]Khanna\u2019s Republican partner on the Epstein bill, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has sharply criticized the Venezuela attack. But other Republicans have returned to the president\u2019s side. \u201cHe\u2019s doing the right thing to keep America safe,\u201d Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a Republican backer of forcing a vote on the Epstein legislation, told us. She didn\u2019t fault Trump for the lack of a congressional heads-up, saying it would have been \u201ca recipe for disaster because members of Congress just can\u2019t be trusted.\u201dBeyond the GOP\u2019s acquiescence, Khanna and Moulton have also been frustrated by the lack of a unified and unequivocal Democratic condemnation of the Venezuela attack. The House and Senate Democratic leaders, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, began their initial statements by noting how detestable Maduro is before shifting to criticism of the Trump administration for acting unilaterally to take him out. That kind of throat clearing, Moulton said, took some of the sting out of their response. Democrats, he told us, need to stick to \u201cthe blunt truth, which is that this is insane, utterly insane.\u201dIn the Senate, Democrats are hoping that at least four Republicans will join them in passing a War Powers Resolution to bar the president from taking further military action in Venezuela without congressional approval. Its author, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, told reporters that it was time for Congress to \u201cget its ass off the couch\u201d and reassert its war-making powers. At least one Trump ally, Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa, took issue with the administration\u2019s claim that the Maduro mission was a law-enforcement operation. He released a statement with the panel\u2019s top Democrat, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, saying that if that was the case, it was \u201cunacceptable\u201d for the administration to exclude the committee that oversees the Justice Department from its classified briefings.Over the weekend, it looked like another Trump ally, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, might break ranks over the Maduro operation. \u201cI look forward to learning what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action in the absence of a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force,\u201d Lee posted on X before dawn on Saturday, briefly returning to his pre-Trump roots as a separation-of-powers hawk. Within two hours, however, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had brought his former Senate colleague back into the fold. By Saturday evening, Lee was reposting memes of Rubio dressed as a saint and a Latin American warlord.A few Republicans have sought something of a middle ground, backing the Venezuela attack while arguing that Congress should have a say in what happens next. \u201cFrom here on out, Congress needs to play a central role,\u201d Representative Kevin Kiley of California told us.Moulton sees little chance of that happening\u2014at least as long as the Republicans in charge remain subservient to Trump. \u201cAt this point,\u201d he lamented, \u201cTrump could kill these Republicans\u2019 kids, and they\u2019d tell him it was a great job.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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