President George W. Bush’s march to war in Iraq was a formative moment for me as a high school sophomore in Indiana. Like millions of Americans, I watched in disbelief as Congress, cowed into compliance by the horrors of September 11 and misled by the White House, ultimately granted Bush sweeping military authority under the 2002 Iraq War Resolution.
In one of his most famous speeches, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) excoriated his colleagues for bowing to the Bush administration’s fearmongering.
“This chamber is, for the most part, silent — ominously, dreadfully silent,” Byrd said. “There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events. … This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy.”
Two decades later, as President Trump escalates his personal conflict with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro to the brink of war, the White House has made clear that it won’t even bother asking for congressional approval.
For years, the Senate eroded its own authority through silence and submission. Facing another turning point in U.S. foreign policy, its members now find they have no authority left to surrender.
As best we can estimate, Trump’s 10 boat strikes have killed at least 43 people, none of whom have been formally identified by the Pentagon or directly linked to any crime. Some may indeed be drug smugglers or members of the Tren de Aragua gang, as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claim. But there really isn’t any way to know; the White House stopped giving Congress details about the strikes weeks ago, even though the War Powers Act requires it.
Trump has argued that he doesn’t need an Authorization for Use of Military Force to prosecute his undeclared war. Nor will the Pentagon or the White House be providing a legal memo legitimizing his decisions. The Office of Legal Counsel allegedly claims the strikes are lawful, but so far has refused to provide its legal reasoning to Congress or to the public. Evidently, the only laws that matter to Trump and Hegseth are the ones they have created for their eyes only.
Few Republicans on Capitol Hill seem to care that their “law and order president” has abandoned even the pretense of adhering to American or international law. Last week, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul at least acknowledged that Trump is now on the verge of becoming “the president of regime change in Venezuela.” But in Paul’s interview with Politico, he sounded just as upset about Trump’s $20 billion bailout of Argentine President Javier Milei as he did about the Pentagon’s extralegal airstrikes, as if those two things were in any way proportional.
If Trump makes good on his boast this week that Venezuelan land strikes are on the way, Congress will be forced either to restrain his military adventurism or to acknowledge that their warmaking power has been permanently transferred to the executive branch. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), once a staunch Senate institutionalist, is resigning himself to the reality of Trump’s total dominance over the legislative branch. In an interview with CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Graham acknowledged that Trump seems set on a land war with Venezuela — and far be it from Senate Republicans to question the president’s reasoning.
Fox News’s warning in 2023 that President Biden was a “wannabe dictator” on the road to full-on totalitarianism now seems quaint in the shadow of a president who has claimed a secretive, unappealable and all-encompassing legal right to assassinate anyone he deems a threat. Trump has “determined” that the U.S. is now at war with the drug cartels he labeled “terrorists” in a recent official memo. But he also labeled Antifa a terrorist threat in a similar order last month. Does that mean Trump now feels legally justified in using similar violent means to eliminate the left-wing groups he considers a threat to the U.S.?
No one at the White House will say. Their silence says enough.
That’s the problem with authoritarianism: By allowing Trump to make up his own rules of engagement against Venezuela, Senate Republicans also give him free rein to decide his own rules of engagement against Americans. Once the laws begin to fall, and no one speaks up, we are left with a government of “anything goes.” Right now, anything is going.
Paul, Graham and their spineless colleagues might delude themselves into thinking that Trump’s sense of legal expediency doesn’t extend to American soil. They are wrong. Coddling autocracy is a fatal miscalculation that has doomed plenty of other legislatures around the world. Our own Senate, once the greatest deliberative body ever created by mankind, is no different.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
