Since president Trump returned to office, Congress has seemed either irrelevant or impotent. Republican majorities in the Senate and the House have acquiesced in the president’s desire to radically expand executive power.
Examples are legion. The Congress sat idly by while the administration dismantled agencies that the Congress created. It sat idly by while the administration refused to spend money it had appropriated. Congress didn’t do a thing when the president ignored laws it passed.
Congress now faces a test of whether it can and will assert itself against a rogue president. It concerns the possible war crime committed on September 2 when the military fired on defenseless people who had survived a first strike on a boat allegedly carrying drugs toward the United States.
If the Congress turns a blind eye to what has unfolded in the Caribbean it will further its complicity in the dismantling of the rule of law in this country. If it is unmoved by the possibility that the American military may have violated the laws of war and simple human decency it will send a chilling message that will further weaken America’s standing in the world.
Republicans must join with Democrats in investigating the September 2 incident and examining the larger context of the Trump Administration's belligerency in the Caribbean.
As the Council on Foreign Relations notes, the administration has assembled an armada of the coast of Venezuela. It includes “the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, destroyers, cruisers, amphibious assault ships, and a special forces support ship. A variety of aircraft have also been active in the region, including bombers, fighters, drones, patrol planes, and support aircraft.”
Almost ten thousand troops and six thousand sailors “have been deployed on U.S. ships active in the region.” The financial cost of this deployment is enormous and the diversion of resources to an unnecessary escapade is not in our country’s best interest.
The Trump Administration insisted that the show of force is necessary to keep safe from the threat of narco terrorism. But Venezuela is not the source of fentanyl or other deadly drugs.
On December 10, things escalated when the Coast Guard seized a Venezuelan oil tanker on the high seas.
That suggests that Trump’s Venezuelan fixation has more to do with the administration’s new big piers/spheres of influence approach to foreign policy than with America’s drug problem. In fact, the administration’s recently released National Security Strategy ranks the exercise of power in the Western Hemisphere as its number one priority.
But as the Council of Foreign Relations observes, “the end goal of the military deployments remains unclear. Experts have speculated that the wide array of military assets could be part of a broader plan to take direct action against the Venezuelan government, or it could be a show of force designed to pressure Maduro into stepping down without a fight.”
Congress has said nothing as we move toward war with Venezuela.
Meantime, the attacks on the boats in the Caribbean continue and lives continue to be taken. At least eighty seven people have died in almost two dozen attacks.
None had a trial. None were found guilty of drug trafficking.
As an article in Rolling Stone observes, “The administration is claiming without much evidence that they are only targeting ‘narco terrorists,’ a flimsy justification for the strikes that many believe are illegal regardless of who was on board the boats.”
In the September 2 attack, nine people were killed in the first strike. Two survived and were seen clinging to the wreckage of their boat.
The laws of war forbid killing survivors. But that didn’t prevent Trump’s military from launching a second strike that killed them.
When the video of the incident was shown in a secret session to senior leaders of the intelligence and foreign affairs committee of the House and Senate, members of the two political parties seemed to have seen different things. Democratic Congressman Jim Himes said that what he saw was “one of most disturbing things” he has ever seen.
On the other hand, Republican Senator Tom Cotton said what the video showed was “lawful and needful.”
There once was a time when such partisan divisions were muted when it came to matters of foreign policy. “Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg exemplified the bipartisan ethos of this era,” the political scientist Jeffrey Friedman observes, “declaring that ‘politics ends at the waters edge’ and shepherding Democratic President Harry Truman’s foreign policy agenda through Congress.”
Such bipartisanship enabled Congress to play a significant role in checking executive power. But no more.
It is time to revive it. Otherwise it is hard to imagine Congress pressing for the release of the September 2 video to the public and playing its constitutionally prescribed role in the unfolding military adventure in the Caribbean.
On December 3, President Trump seemed to agree that the video should be released. Responding to a question about the September 2 incident he said, “I don't know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release no problem."
Five days later, he changed his time and denied that he had said any such thing.
Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, has been doing the kind of bobbing and weaving about whether he will release the video that would have made the great boxer, Muhammad Ali, proud.
A few Senate Republicans have suggested that the video should be released, but they have not done much more than issue statements.
Some, however, think that what is happening in the Caribbean and what happened on September 2 “has awakened the Republican-controlled Congress to its oversight role after months of frustration about the trickle of information from the Pentagon.”
Other evidence of that awakening is found in “the annual defense authorization bill which was crafted by both Republicans and Democrats, Congress is demanding that the Pentagon turn over unedited video of the strikes, as well as the orders authorizing the attacks. The legislation threatens to withhold a quarter of Hegseth's travel budget if he refuses.”
This is all to the good, but we have seen such predictions before, only to be extinguished when Republicans in Congress lose their nerve after the president pushes back. Whether he will do so in this case is not clear.
Whatever Trump does, the Congress needs to assert itself quickly, lest incidents like what happened on September 2 proliferate and the United States finds itself in a war with Venezuela.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
