As U.S. President Donald Trump pushes the boundaries of executive power in the matters of trade and military action further and further, Congress’s conspicuous absence in pushing back against the president’s bold usurpation of authorities that the U.S. Constitution explicitly delegates to the legislative branch has become all the more glaring.
Recent votes in the Senate have highlighted just how far afield the Republican Party has traveled from its own previous long-standing stances in support of free trade. On other key votes in recent days on the permissibility of the Trump administration’s expanding regional maritime strikes on alleged drug-running vessels and the legality of any military action against the Venezuelan government, Republican lawmakers have overwhelmingly accepted the administration’s assertions that it is targeting “narco-terrorists” and have declined to preemptively put limitations on a potential effort to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro regime.
As U.S. President Donald Trump pushes the boundaries of executive power in the matters of trade and military action further and further, Congress’s conspicuous absence in pushing back against the president’s bold usurpation of authorities that the U.S. Constitution explicitly delegates to the legislative branch has become all the more glaring.
Recent votes in the Senate have highlighted just how far afield the Republican Party has traveled from its own previous long-standing stances in support of free trade. On other key votes in recent days on the permissibility of the Trump administration’s expanding regional maritime strikes on alleged drug-running vessels and the legality of any military action against the Venezuelan government, Republican lawmakers have overwhelmingly accepted the administration’s assertions that it is targeting “narco-terrorists” and have declined to preemptively put limitations on a potential effort to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro regime.
The Senate held votes last week on three separate measures to end a series of tariffs that Trump imposed this year, including his sweeping global tariffs; tariffs on Canada that the White House controversially justified by claiming a national fentanyl emergency existed on the northern border; and tariffs on Brazil that the president said were a response to the Brazilian Supreme Court’s criminal case against Trump ally and former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted of attempting a coup after his 2022 election loss.
Though each of the resolutions narrowly passed the Senate after a couple of Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats, the measures face steep procedural hurdles in the House, where Republican leaders have more tools to preemptively block them from being voted on.
“I think we’ve seen probably for the last half-century an ebbing of congressional authority to the executive,” said Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, a lead sponsor of two recently rejected war powers resolutions related to the military’s maritime attacks on alleged drug smugglers and the growing U.S. naval buildup near Venezuela.
“You could probably add up the sum total of that accretion of executive power in the last several decades, and it will be less than what’s happened in the last several months. Congress needs to reinsert itself, its control over the power of the purse and certainly its war power,” Schiff added.
With Congress under full Republican control and largely absenting itself from imposing any meaningful check on Trump, it will be likely the Supreme Court that acts first on the tariffs question. During oral arguments in a case before the high court this week, a majority of justices sounded skeptical about the administration’s contention that it has essentially unfettered powers to interfere with the U.S. economy through the mercurial imposition of tariffs.
“The legal basis for Trump’s use of tariffs is extremely weak,” said Jordan Tama, a professor at American University who specializes in congressional oversight of U.S. foreign policy. “The International Emergency Economic Powers Actwhich the Trump administration has cited as the basis for the tariffs, authorizes the use of sanctions in the event of a national emergency that [constitutes] an unusual and extraordinary threat.”
Tama argued that long-running trade deficits could hardly be viewed as unusual under the definition of the law and that the prosecution of a politician in a foreign country such as Brazil didn’t represent an “extraordinary” emergency to the American people. A group of leading economists made a similar argument in an amicus brief filed on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case.
“Every member of Congress should recognize that Trump’s use of tariffs is inconsistent with laws that have been passed by Congress, and therefore all members of Congress should be opposing Trump on that,” Tama continued. “It is sad and distressing to see the vast majority of Republicans voting against these bills. I would say, though, that the bills are not necessarily insignificant even if they are not going to become enacted into law.”
On war powers, just two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul, voted with Democrats this week to forbid the administration from conducting military operations inside Venezuela or against the Maduro regime without explicit congressional authorization. The Nov. 6 procedural motion on the joint resolution failed, 49-51, amid strong opposition from the White House.
The outcome of this week’s failed vote to ban unauthorized military action against Venezuela was virtually identical to a vote on a similar resolution on Oct. 8 that attempted to order an end to Trump’s unauthorized military strikes in the Caribbean. That measure was rejected48-51, with Democrat John Fetterman joining Republicans in the vote and Murkowski and Paul voting with Democrats.
Republican Jim Risch, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke in opposition to the legislative effort to block unauthorized military strikes against the Venezuelan government. But his floor remarks focused on the attacks against the alleged drug smugglers, and he did not touch on the growing question of whether Trump aims to overthrow Maduro.
“President Trump has taken decisive action to protect thousands of Americans from lethal narcotics. He’s kept drugs off the streets, kept children alive, and eliminated narco-terrorists, who have been profiting off of the deaths of members of our communities,” Risch said on Thursday. “These people have been transmitting drugs into the United States via a lot of different ways. One of them was by shipping vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean.”
In the weeks between the two war powers votes, as the number of those killed in the boat strikes steadily ticked upward (now estimated at 70 people), concerns have only grown about the legality of Trump’s actions.
Even though the administration and its Republican backers insist the military is attacking narco-terrorists, when there have been survivors of the strikes, they haven’t been treated the way that other captured terrorists are generally treated by the United States: with imprisonment and prosecution. Rather, survivors have been returned to their home countries—and in at least one of those cases, one of the alleged drug smugglers was released by the Ecuadorian government, which said it did not have legal grounds to detain him.
Behind the scenes, there are signs that more Republicans are not wholly convinced of the administration’s assertions of sweeping legal authority to carry out its military attacks in the Caribbean and nearby Pacific. Democrat Mark Kelly, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was invited to just one classified briefing on the strikes.
“We got one brief, but to be honest, they [the Trump administration] didn’t share all of the information,” Kelly said. “It was fair to say there was bipartisan frustration on the amount of information they would provide us. They would tell us, ‘We’re not going to give you that,’ and in trying to explain to us the legal rationale for doing this, it was rather hard to follow, confusing. They were tying themselves in knots trying to explain this, and they had a lot of questions that they either couldn’t answer or refused to answer.”
For his part, Risch indicated that he was satisfied with the legal justifications that the administration had provided.
“Myself and many of my colleagues have sat recently through hours of briefings and legal analysis by government legal departments and attorneys who have studied this issue,” Risch said in his floor remarks. “Unanimously, they have concluded that the action taken by President Trump is absolutely lawful.”
