'We cannot cede power': Trump tramples Congress as GOP stays silent

Trump’s administration increasingly sidelines Congress, launching military actions without authorization and clawing back approved funding.

Washington: The Pentagon barred the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee from making an oversight visit to a military spy agency.

Armed forces off the coast of Venezuela began a military campaign against alleged members of a drug cartel without any authorization from Congress and without notifying key members.

The White House informed Congress it planned to use a rare maneuver to skirt a vote and cancel nearly $5 billion in foreign aid funding that lawmakers had already approved, the latest escalation of its campaign to undercut the legislative branch’s spending powers.

And just a month after senators had confirmed her, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, ousted the director of the Centers for Disease Control. He also put forward changes that would effectively restrict access to COVID-19 vaccines, after pledging to senators during his own confirmation hearings that he would not make it more difficult.

The Trump administration continues to erode the power of Congress, trampling on its constitutional prerogatives in ways large and small. Through it all, Republicans in charge have mostly shrugged — and in some cases, outright applauded — as their powers, once jealously guarded, diminish in ways that will be difficult to reverse.

In recent weeks, GOP leaders have looked on passively as the president has fired a litany of agency leaders whom senators worked for weeks to confirm, from the CDC to the IRS to the Federal Reserve.

And they have shown little appetite for challenging the administration, even as a few have expressed occasional displeasure about the consequences of their decisions earlier this year to swallow their reservations about some of his nominees and confirm them.

“We have confirmed a vaccine denier,” Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vet., lamented during a hearing last week featuring Kennedy. “On tariffs, we’ve given up our constitutional responsibility. On appropriations, we’re bending the knee to an administration that is rescinding and deciding what to spend and what not to spend, despite the way our law, in a bipartisan way, was passed.

“We cannot cede power,” Welch added. “There are consequences.”

For nearly a century, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have sought to amass more power, particularly to conduct foreign policy and military operations, and with a few exceptions, succeeded in chipping away at congressional influence. What is different now is the degree of disdain Trump has shown for Congress — and the willingness of GOP leaders to defer to him even when it means undercutting their coequal branch of government.

“That is the big story here — not that a president is trying to push the bounds of their authority, because our system was designed with that in mind,” Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said in an interview. “The true story is that Republicans in Congress have capitulated and are not pushing back to assert authority.”

Republicans largely reject the idea that they have ceded congressional powers of oversight and spending to the White House. They argue that Trump is wielding his executive authority appropriately to bring a vast federal bureaucracy to heel and pointed to the testy hearing featuring Kennedy as proof that they are willing to scrutinize the administration’s actions.

But so far, their most tangible response has come in the form of mild protests from a few Republicans.

When Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, expressed unhappiness after the spate of agency firings, he cited procedural objections: “We confirm these people, we go through a lot of work to get them confirmed, and they’re in office a month?” he asked.

Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Republican and an orthopedic surgeon, raised eyebrows when he told Kennedy at last week’s hearing that he had “grown deeply concerned” about his handling of vaccines, after reminding the secretary that he had “promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines” during his confirmation hearings.

But Republicans have yet to announce any oversight hearings on the matter.

They also have not scheduled any action to block the Trump administration from its latest move to unilaterally claw back money that has already been appropriated just weeks before the end of the fiscal year.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, called the proposal a “clear violation of the law” and has been working with top Senate Democrats to add new safeguards to next year’s spending bills that would ensure the Trump administration allocates federal dollars as lawmakers intend.

“Congress alone bears the constitutional responsibility for funding our government,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said last week. “And any effort to claw back resources outside of the appropriations process undermines that responsibility.”

But party leaders appear unlikely to intercede to reject the effort.

Republicans also have been remarkably quiet as the Trump administration seeks to circumvent oversight on issues of national security and intelligence, traditionally an area in which Congress’ role has been seen as sacrosanct.

While it has been generations since Congress used its formal power to declare war, it did authorize both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, albeit with broad laws that would end up allowing presidents of both parties to exercise military might in ways lawmakers might not have anticipated.

The campaign against Venezuelan drug cartels announced last week by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, is not covered by any congressional authorization. While the Trump administration did not offer any legal justification, experts said that in the absence of any act of Congress, the military action could only be justified under a legal theory that the president has broad authority to use the military as he sees fit.

“There’s absolutely no question the president doesn’t have the power to take airstrikes on boats outside U.S. waters with no authorization of war,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “This president believes he’s above the law. He doesn’t believe the law applies to him. He doesn’t believe the Constitution applies to him, and if we act like that’s normal, then we just encourage the continued illegal constitutional behavior.”

The failure to inform Congress about its attack on a Venezuelan boat last week, lawmakers said, was part of a pattern by the Trump administration of ignoring requirements to inform lawmakers and withholding information about national security matters that other presidents would have shared.

The New York Times reported Friday that the first Trump administration had failed to notify Congress of a risky military incursion into North Korea to plant a listening device in 2019. Only under the Biden administration were key members of Congress told of the secret mission that led to the death of several North Koreans but did not achieve its goal.

“There is just no situation in which an intelligence operation, a special operation, of this magnitude, whether it is successful or not successful, should be conducted without Congress knowing about it,” said Crow, who requested a briefing on the operation after the Times story was published. “North Korea is a dangerous and volatile regime. The idea that you are going to just send in a military operation to a country like that without involving the United States Congress is beyond absurd.”