The Senate has been a bit more proactive, holding two votes on ending the attacks — one in October and one this month. Both resolutions failed, with only two Republicans breaking ranks to vote in support. The most recent vote, which included a bar on any broadening of attacks to Venezuelan territory, was the most difficult challenge yet to the administration. It entailed numerous closed-door briefings (mostly to Republicans), lots of arm-twisting, and assurances the president did not intend to escalate the conflict into a land war in Latin America — for now.
This latest scenario is all too familiar. Congress is aware of its heavy constitutional primacy over questions of war and peace, but it eventually caves in deference to a president’s assertion of his powers as “commander in chief” to preserve and protect the nation’s safety and security from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
A similar question of presidential encroachments on Congress’s powers arose last week when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case challenging the president’s worldwide imposition of tariffs on foreign exports to the U.S. The president claims his authority derives from a 1977 emergency economic powers law, though the word “tariff” does not appear in that law.
Justice Neil Gorsuch asked Solicitor General John Sauer, “If Congress can hand off its tariff power to the president,” what is to prevent it from “handing over all its responsibility for regulating foreign commerce — or, for that matter, to declare foreign war — to the president?”
Sauer replied, “That would really be an abdication, not a delegation.”
And yet, abdication is where so many of these cases seem to be heading, given Congress’s refusal to defend its constitutional prerogatives.
