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Tuesday, January 06, 2026
Jamie Raskin: Jan. 6 Never Ended
Jamie Raskin: Jan. 6
Never Ended
Jan. 6, 2026, 1:00 a.m. ET
By Jamie Raskin
Mr.
Raskin, who represents Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District, is the ranking
member of the House Judiciary Committee. He was the lead prosecutor in the
second impeachment trial of President Trump.
Tuesday is a heavy day
for the police officers who fought to put down the bloody insurrection at the
Capitol five years ago. It is also a solemn day for the F.B.I. agents and
federal prosecutors who worked the largest criminal investigation in American history
to bring the members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and all the other
police-attacking rioters to justice.
Five years after Jan. 6,
2021, we are still caught up in a struggle between forces who are willing to
use authoritarian violence outside the Constitution to take and wield power and
those who stand up nonviolently for our Constitution in the streets and in the
polling places. Neither side can claim victory yet.
It’s still very much
Jan. 6 in America.
Thanks to the fastidious work of the
House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 Attack and the former special counsel Jack
Smith, we have a broad understanding of President Trump’s big lie about the
2020 election. He claims to have won but actually lost by more than seven
million votes and 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. We know about his defeat
from court rulings destroying more than 60 outlandish federal and state court
lawsuits alleging election fraud, the political shakedown he waged against
election officials such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia,
the recruitment of counterfeit electors in swing states, Mr. Trump’s campaign
to mobilize the Justice Department to his conspiracy and his efforts to coerce
Vice President Mike Pence to unlawfully reject Joe Biden’s Electoral College
votes so Mr. Trump could be anointed president.
These findings have not been
meaningfully refuted in any way. Although certain behind-the-scenes maneuvers
remain murky, in part because key witnesses like Mr. Trump have refused to
testify, no amount of whitewashing can erase the images of “stop the steal”
rioters assaulting police officers with baseball bats, metal pipes, Confederate
and Trump flagpoles, bear spray and other chemicals. The rampaging mob drove
members of Congress out of our chambers, conducted a search-and-destroy mission
for the mahogany boxes containing Electoral College votes and prepared a
gallows on the Capitol grounds for the vice president as they hunted him down,
chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”
Mr. Trump and the
election deniers tell a different story. For MAGA adherents, Jan. 6 is a
kaleidoscopic projection of wild and contradictory conspiracy theories.
Sometimes they frame it as 1776, a historic day of revolutionary resistance to
the “deep state.” At other times, it’s a foreign-aligned corporate vote-rigging
scheme against him — notwithstanding that Fox News was forced to pay $787.5
million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over
the channel’s airing of those fraudulent claims.
At the same time, MAGA
depicts the whole insurrection as a false flag operation organized by antifa,
the F.B.I. and the speaker of the House at the time, Nancy Pelosi. Mr. Trump’s
incoherent revisionist mythology of Jan. 6 has become an organizing policy
commitment of his administration. On Inauguration Day, he pardoned or commuted
the prison sentences of each of the nearly 1,600 rioters and seditionists
(apparently no longer antifa fighters). This move bypassed the U.S. pardon
attorney and discarded centuries of understanding that pardons should go to
petitioners who have shown true remorse and contrition, rehabilitation and a
lack of dangerousness. Consider just a few pardonees:
Daniel Rodriguez
repeatedly plunged a stun gun into the neck of Officer Michael Fanone as the
mob chanted, “Kill him with his gun.” Officer Fanone suffered a heart attack
and traumatic brain injuries. The judge in the case called Mr. Rodriguez a
“one-man army of hate” and sentenced him to more than 12 years in prison for
attacking Officer Fanone — who was not on duty that day but rushed to the
Capitol to help his fellow officers.
Patrick McCaughey III
used a stolen police riot shield to crush Officer Daniel Hodges in a metal door
frame. Mr. McCaughey left Officer Hodges trapped, bleeding, unable to breathe
and crying for help. The judge in this case, a Trump appointee, described Mr.
McCaughey as the “poster child for all that was dangerous and appalling” about
the riot and sentenced him to more than seven years in prison.
Mr. Trump granted clemency to dozens
of people who had committed or been accused of violent and horrific crimes
after Jan. 6, such as plotting the murders of
F.B.I. agents, resisting arrest, assault, rape, burglary, stalking, stabbing, possession of child sex abuse
materials and D.U.I. homicide. One
of Mr. Trump’s pardoned Jan. 6 rioters, John Banuelos, bragged in court before
the pardons were issued that he would never do time. “President Trump’s going
to be in office six months from now, so I’m not worried about it,” he said.
On Oct. 17, 2025, nine
months after the mass pardon, police officers arrested Mr. Banuelos on new
charges of kidnapping and sexual assault relating to a 2018 incident. He
is accused of trapping his victim in his home and beating, strangling and
sexually assaulting her.
Mr. Trump punished law
enforcement officials en masse for doing their jobs. He conducted a
bureaucratic purge — with firings and permanent demotions — of hundreds of
experienced F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors because they investigated and
prosecuted the Jan. 6 cases assigned to them. He installed Jan. 6
insurrectionists in the highest ranks of the Department of Justice.
Ed Martin, who leads the
Justice Department’s Orwellian new Weaponization Working Group and serves as
the U.S. pardon attorney, is a Jan. 6 participant who said he would fight to
“stop the steal” until his “last breath.” In a social post, he likened the mayhem
at the Capitol to a Mardi Gras celebration. He hired as his
senior adviser Jared Wise, another proud Jan. 6-er who repeatedly yelled, “Kill
’em,” as rioters attacked police officers and whose trial on numerous charges
had just begun when Mr. Trump pardoned him.
These moves at the
Justice Department have cost the government thousands of collective years of
investigative and prosecutorial experience, demoralized the civil service and
reduced our government to the moral level of a gangster state.
On this uncertain anniversary, here
are the people who give me hope: the Republicans who placed their love of
country over their subservience to Mr. Trump; the Jan. 6 rioters who regret
their participation, like Pam Hemphill, who rejected Mr. Trump’s pardon; and
all the Americans — Democrats, independents and Republicans — who are
organizing a revival of creative political participation across the country.
Meanwhile, the official
government position toward the Jan. 6 anniversary is silence and indifference:
The Republican-controlled Congress is doing nothing to acknowledge the day.
In March 2022, Congress passed a law
requiring that, within a year, a plaque be hung in the Capitol in honor of the
hundreds of officers who put their bodies and lives on the line to defend
members of Congress and the besieged vice president. The plaque makes a promise
about our police officers: “Their heroism will never be forgotten.” It still
has not been installed.
Jamie Raskin is the ranking member of the House Judiciary
Committee. He was the lead prosecutor in the second impeachment trial of Donald
Trump and is the author of “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of
American Democracy.”
HEATHER
Five years ago, on January 6, 2021, more than 2,000 rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the process of counting the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president of the United States. They tried to hunt down House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and chanted their intention to “Hang Mike Pence,” the vice president. They fantasized that they were following in the footsteps of the American Founders, about to start a new nation. Newly elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5, 2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history.” On January 6 she wrote: “Today is 1776.”
In fact, it was not 1776 but 1861, the year insurrectionists who had tried to overthrow the government in order to establish minority rule tried to break the U.S. The rioters wanted to take away the right at the center of American democracy—our right to determine our own destiny—in order to keep Donald J. Trump in the White House, making sure the power of elite white men could not be challenged. It was no accident that the rioters carried a Confederate battle flag.
Since the 1980s, Republicans pushed the idea that a popular government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends. As cuts to regulation, taxation, and the nation’s social safety net began to hollow out the middle class, Republicans pushed the idea that the country’s problems came from greedy minorities and women who wanted to work outside the home. More and more, they insisted that the federal government was stealing tax dollars and destroying society, and they encouraged individual men to take charge of the country.
After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, more commonly known as the motor voter law, enabling people to register to vote at motor vehicle departments, Republicans increasingly insisted Democrats were cheating the system by relying on the votes of noncitizens, although there was never any evidence for this charge.
As wealth continued to move upward, the idea that individuals and paramilitary groups must “reclaim” America from undeserving Americans who were taking tax dollars and cheating to win elections became embedded in the Republican Party. By 2014, Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters “patriots” when they showed up armed to meet officials from the Bureau of Land Management who tried to impound Bundy’s cattle because he owed more than $1 million in grazing fees for running cattle on public land.
The idea of reclaiming the country for white men by destroying the federal government grew, along with the idea that Democrats could win elections only by cheating. In 2016, Trump insisted that his female Democratic opponent belonged in jail and that he alone could save the country from the Washington, D.C., “swamp.” Other Republican leaders who had initially shunned him began to support him when it became clear that he could mobilize a new crop of disaffected voters who could put Republicans into office.
And they continued to support him, claiming initially that he could be kept in check by establishment Republicans like his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who moved from leading the Republican National Committee to the White House for the first six months of Trump’s first term. In his first months in office, Trump delivered the tax cut Republican leaders wanted, as well as the appointment of one out of every four federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices, who would protect the Republican project in the courts.
But the idea that Trump could be kept in check fell apart in September 2019, when it appeared he was trying to rig the 2020 election. A whistleblower revealed that Trump had called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in July 2019 to demand that Zelensky smear former vice president Joe Biden, who was beating Trump in most polls going into the 2020 election season. Until Zelensky did so, Trump said, the administration would not release the money Congress had appropriated to fund Ukraine’s fight against Russia, which had invaded Ukraine in 2014.
The attempt to withhold congressionally appropriated funds in order to tilt an election was a glaring violation of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act codifying the executive branch’s duty to execute the laws Congress passed. In the congressional investigation that followed, witnesses revealed that Trump’s cronies were running a secret scheme in Ukraine to undermine official U.S. policy and benefit Trump’s allies.
Republicans in 1974 had turned against President Richard Nixon for far less, but although Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said not a single Republican senator believed Trump, they stood behind him nonetheless. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues: “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing…. It’s about flipping the Senate.”
But once acquitted, Trump cut loose from any oversight. He sought revenge and insisted that “[w]hen somebody is President of the United States, the authority is total.” “The federal government has absolute power,” he said, and he had the “absolute right” to use that power if he wanted to.
As early as 2019, Trump had “joked” about staying in power regardless of the 2020 election results, and on October 31, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon told a private audience that Trump was going to declare that he had won the 2020 election no matter what. Trump knew that Democratic mail-in ballots would show up in the vote totals later than Republican votes cast on Election Day, creating a “red mirage” that would be overtaken later by Democratic votes.
“Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said, by calling the election early and saying that the later votes were somehow illegitimate. “That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” Bannon continued: “Here’s the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again…. He’s gonna say ‘F*ck you. How about that?’ Because…he’s done his last election.”
Early returns on Election Night 2020, November 3, showed Trump ahead. But, more quickly than anyone expected, Democratic votes turned the key state of Arizona blue, and the Fox News Channel called the race for Biden. Furious, Trump took to the airwaves at about 2:30 the next morning and declared he had won, although ballots were still being counted and several battleground states had no clear winner. “We won’t stand for this,” he told supporters, assuring them he had won. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop.”
But it didn’t, and by the time all the ballots were counted, the election was not close: Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.
Trump insisted a Democrat could not have won honestly. Over the next few months, his campaign demanded recounts, all of which confirmed that Biden won. Trump or his surrogates filed and lost at least 63 lawsuits over the 2020 election, most dismissed for lack of evidence.
As legal challenges failed, Trump pressured Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” to win the state of Georgia. Trump’s allies plotted for Trump supporters in seven battleground states to meet secretly and submit false slates of electors for Trump. Two slates would enable Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count the electors from the now-contested states, so that either Trump would be elected outright, or Pence could say there was no clear winner and send the election to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. Since there were more Republican delegations than Democratic ones, Trump would be president.
“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Trump’s evangelical chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote on November 24, 2020, to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni.
Determined to retain control of the government, certain congressional Republicans went along with the charade that the election had been stolen. Trump allies in the House began to echo Trump’s accusations and to say they would question the counts from certain states. Such challenges required a paired vote with a senator, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who saw himself as a top 2024 presidential contender, and Ted Cruz of Texas, who didn’t want to be undercut, led 11 other senators in a revolt to challenge the ballots.
For weeks, Trump had urged his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., for a “Stop the Steal” rally arranged for January 6, the day Congress would count the certified electoral ballots. Speaking at the Ellipse near the White House that morning, Trump and his surrogates told the crowd that they had won the election, and Trump warned: “We are going to have to fight much harder.”
Trump claimed that Chinese-driven socialists were taking over the country and told the crowd: “We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy.” “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated…. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
And, knowing they were armed, he told them to march to the Capitol.
As Trump’s supporters attacked, lawmakers from their hiding spots begged the president to call off his supporters, but he did nothing for more than three hours. After 5:40, when the National Guard had been deployed without his orders, thus making it clear the rioters would be overpowered before either taking over the government themselves or giving him an excuse to declare martial law, Trump issued a video statement.
“I know you’re hurt,” he said. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now…. We love you. You’re very special.” He tweeted: “Remember this day forever!”
When the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for a second time on January 13, 2021, for incitement of insurrection, only 10 Republicans voted in favor, while 197 voted no (4 did not vote). In the Senate trial, 7 Republican senators joined the Democrats to convict, while 43 continued to back Trump.
In a speech after his vote to acquit, McConnell said, “There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” but said he must answer for his actions in court. “Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office,” McConnell said. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
In November 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to investigate Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump for four felonies associated with his attempt to retain power illegally.
Trump fought back, arguing that he had presidential immunity for his actions. Smith asked the Supreme Court to decide the case immediately, but it waited until the last possible moment, on July 1, 2024, to decide Donald J. Trump v. United States, finding that presidents have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. Trump himself had appointed three of the justices in the majority.
A second grand jury returned a new indictment stripped of the actions now immune, but by then it was too late: Trump was reelected president, and the Department of Justice has an understanding that it will not indict or prosecute a sitting president. And so, five years after the events of January 6, 2021, we are learning what it means to have a president who has demonstrated his determination to overthrow our democracy and who does not have to answer to the law.
Although he was elected with less than 50% of the votes cast, Trump claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” As soon as he took office in January 2025, the president and his henchmen flouted the 1974 Impoundment Control Act again, seizing Congress’s right to control the nation’s finances. Trump used emergency powers to ignore the Constitution and deployed troops in Democratic-led cities. When Congress required the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files, the administration largely ignored the law. Today, more than two weeks after the deadline, it had released less than 1% of the files. Ignoring the rights afforded to individuals by the Constitution, Trump is seizing people off the streets and prosecuting his perceived enemies.
Trump has taken on himself the right to go to war with another country in order to take its oil, and is openly working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since the 1940s. Today, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
That vision is a profound rejection of the principles of the rules-based international order, which was designed to use power for deterrence rather than domination. It is also a profound rejection of the principles of American democracy, a system of checks and balances to channel power into a government that could deliver stability and prosperity to all the people, not just a select few.
In 1863, when that system was unraveling under pressure from those who wanted to base society on a system of enslavement that enriched an elite, Republican president Abraham Lincoln asked Americans to remember those who had died to protect a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln asked Americans to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion,” and to resolve that “these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN
AI Is Coming for This Age-Old
Industry
Many
business leaders don’t yet appreciate the speed at which AI is progressing—and
how rapidly it’s moving both downstream and upstream in the labor task stack.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
Jan 5, 2026
I spoke recently at an
annual meeting for owners and managers of large commercial construction firms
and, of course, a great deal of the conversation was about the impacts of
automation, robotics and AI on their industry. I came away from the meeting
and the many side conversations with one overwhelming impression—these folks
think that their industry will be one of the very last to be adversely impacted
by AI because, as one guy put it, “software can’t swing a sledgehammer.” The
necessity for large quantities of manual labor in all of their projects would
be their salvation for the foreseeable future.
They had all seen charts
projecting the relative degrees of exposure that various industries had to new
technologies, and typically construction was at or near the bottom of the
lists. They admitted that every few months they were seeing new tools, equipment,
and computer-driven machines being introduced which augmented the abilities of
their workers and took over certain manual functions, but they didn’t envision
a time any time soon when those folks would actually be entirely replaced.
Watching a mobile robot with an extendable arm equipped with a nail gun handle
an entire ceiling of precise installations instead of some poor guy with a
ladder, bursitis and a sore shoulder trying to do the same overhead job, but
taking five times as long, tells you everything you need to know about where
we’re ultimately headed.
My audience members were
actually far more concerned about the fact that—in order to keep up with the
growing national demand—and given the fact that their workforce was rapidly
aging out, the construction industry will need more than 500,000 additional workers
each year. I’ve repeatedly stressed the need for massive increases in vocational training starting in high school and,
in many cases, entirely in lieu of an expensive, debt-infused and
time-consuming traditional four-year college education.
It’s possible that the
industry leaders are finally waking up to the fact that they can’t simply leave
this issue up to the educators or frankly the government if they want something
substantial and timely to be done about the labor shortages. Education is a
business that’s too important and too valuable to be left in the hands of
educators. Of course, because almost everything Trump does largely screws his
own supporters, thousands of skilled “foreign” workers are being seized,
arrested, deported or simply scared off these very job sites across the country
by the masked ICE clowns, so the current labor shortages are getting worse
every day.
I think the unfortunate
aspect of this situation is that the target industries and operators don’t yet
appreciate the speed at which the level of AI understanding and intelligence is
progressing and how rapidly it’s moving both downstream and upstream in the
labor task stack. I have some particular expertise and experience in this
process because I watched a very similar progression in the auto insurance
industry starting decades ago where computer-created estimates quickly replaced
the manual work product of thousands of experienced adjusters.
The computers knew in
minutes the work typically required for a given repair, the parts needed, the
time required to perform the operations, and, of course, exactly what the total
costs of the entire claim should be. If the damage was severe and the car was a
total loss, the computers could calculate and make a settlement offer
instantly. Veteran adjusters with years and years of field work were reduced to
glorified picture takers of the wrecked vehicles involved. With the advent of
the cell phone and the ability of computers to now read and interpret images,
the claimants and insured themselves can submit photos and save everyone the
time and costs of having adjusters travel to physically inspect the cars. When
you add to this situation, the cumulative experience which all the computers
and AI systems now have of thousands of prior wrecks and repairs based on
similar, if not identical, vehicles, it’s possible for the systems to generate
claim settlement offers on the fly and thereby save all of the parties weeks of
costs and delays in resolving accident and theft claims.
As I watch the costing
processes on construction sites these days, the job cost “estimators” whose
expertise is doing take-offs and other calculations to arrive at multi-million
dollar cost estimates for entire construction projects, it’s clear that their
days are also numbered, and the precision guesswork that they do will quite
rapidly be supplemented and eventually entirely replaced by AI systems. This is
another situation where their considerable and hard-earned knowledge and
abilities will quickly be devalued in two respects: first, the nature of the
work that they are charged with estimating will be quickly and radically
changed; and second, the AI systems will have better and more immediate access
to all of the costs of the components, materials, labor, etc. in real time as
compared to the old-time estimators’ seat-of-the-pants guesses.
Here again, a simple
example is the programmable robotic painting machine which can now tape and
paint an entire room in a fraction of the prior time required with sufficient
directions from the construction plans to move around doors, windows and other openings
and precisely apply the exact amount of paint required. While an old-time
estimator might know what time it took Joe, the painter, and his assistant to
get the room done, the AI system already knows what it will cost for the robots
to paint the entire building and how long it will take. This isn’t science
fiction or some distant future vision; this is what’s happening on the ground
every day right now. And finally, it takes one or two guys to watch the robots
rather than a dozen guys to paint the place.
As the farmer said to
his horse: “You won’t lose your job to a tractor, but to a horse who learns to
drive a tractor.”
Monday, January 05, 2026
JOYCE Vance
The Week Ahead
January 4, 2026
What is Donald Trump running away from so hard? Is it the fifth anniversary of his January 6 insurrection, which we will mark on Tuesday? It should be.
It could be Jack Smith’s newly released testimony, which is damning and damaging—and we haven’t even gotten the release date of Volume II of his special counsel report, due sometime in February unless Trump manages to hang it up in court. On balance, Congressman Jim Jordan’s “Weaponization” work is backfiring.
It could also be the Epstein Files. DOJ missed its reporting date to Congress over the weekend, and the full release of the files is still nowhere in sight.
Donald Trump has a lot to try to hide from. It could be all of the above, and it’s all closing in on him this week. In the past, he has always been able to delay or distract just long enough for the public to forget. But this week, the past seems to be catching up with the lame duck president.
That may be at least a partial explanation for Trump’s strike on Venezuela—distract, distract, distract. It’s a better explanation than Trump as a committed warrior against narcoterrorism. That one doesn’t work particularly well for Donald Trump, who pardoned Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández, a man who former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in our Substack Live on Sunday morning, “personally trafficked tons of cocaine into the United States and actually said at one point he wanted to shove cocaine up the noses of the gringos.” When Trump pardoned Hernández, he said, “If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life.” As Jake pointed out, and I agree, “the drugs excuse holds no water.”
This week, we’ll be watching Congress—and watching Trump watch Congress, which has been showing a few signs of life lately. I don’t want to oversell that, but this is definitely a week that warrants paying attention, particularly with the privileged War Powers Resolution I mentioned in last night’s post coming to the Senate floor this week. The ball is in Congress’ court.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, as well as to “make rules concerning captures on land and water.” Presidents before and including Trump, as experts at the Brennan Center explain, have tried to claim some of that authority for themselves, using “outdated and overstretched war authorizations like the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force.” Multiple presidents have also “asserted an inherent authority to undertake airstrikes, raids, and other military interventions without prior congressional authorization. When Congress has authorized conflict, such as the War in Afghanistan and Iraq War, presidents have overread Congress’s approval and expanded U.S. military involvement into countries that Congress never contemplated. Compounding the problem, presidents often fail to give Congress the information it needs to oversee these conflicts.” This is not a Trump problem—presidents since at least George H.W. Bush have claimed a share of Congress’ power. But Trump, who is uniquely interested in amassing presidential power, has the potential to move on from Venezuela and keep going, if Congress doesn’t step in and assert itself.
It’s possible for two things to be true at once: it’s possible that Maduro was a corrupt, dangerous leader and also, that our Constitution and the separation of powers demand preserving. Our country does not, and indeed cannot, remove every dangerous leader around the globe from office with in-country strikes. We could strengthen local populations with stability-enhancing programs like USAID (which the Trump administration, of course, has cut) to increase the ability of local populations to act on their own impulses. We can engage in vigorous law enforcement, like the prosecution of Honduras’ former president. But we can do so without permitting our president to freelance as a warlord, especially one with dubious motives. So don’t buy into the false equivalency that says the smash and grab in Venezuela that resulted in Maduro’s arrest was a righteous exercise of the president’s power.
The constitutional prescription for fixing this problem of presidential overreach is Congress. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker had something to say about that over the weekend, in light of the Trump administration’s strike on Venezuela.
“Today,” he wrote, “many leaders will rightly condemn President Donald Trump’s unlawful and unjust actions in Venezuela, and I join them.
But then, Senator Booker put the blame precisely where it is due. He continued, “just as glaring, and far more damning, is Congress’ ongoing abdication of its constitutional duty. For almost a year now, the legislative branch has failed to check a president who repeatedly violates his oath, disregards the law, and endangers American interests at home and abroad.”
He called out the Republican-led Congress for choosing “spineless complicity over its sworn responsibilities.” He condemned its inaction in the face of Signalgate, with Trump’s “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth escaping any censure for “the reckless leaking of classified information that put American troops at risk.” The senator also pointed to the “stunning absence of accountability” for the administration’s “illegal use of military force destroying vessels and killing people in the Caribbean and the Pacific without congressional authorization.”
Booker cited a litany of Congressional failures:
No hearings.
No serious investigations.
No enforcement of checks and balances.
No accountability.
He called Congress cowardly and submissive.
We are long past due for someone to speak so plainly to the country about the Republican-led Congress’ failure to do its constitutional duty. The question is, who is listening, and will it lead to action this week? As my good friend Norm Eisen like to say, I am not optimistic, but I am hopeful.
Booker writes that “Republicans in Congress own this corrosive collapse of our constitutional order” and that their submission to Trump’s will “now stands as one of the greatest dangers to our nation and to the global order America claims to defend.” The fact that Maduro is “a brutal dictator who has committed grave abuses” does not, Booker concludes, suspend the Constitution. And so, he drives home the point of what must come next:
“The Constitution is unambiguous: Congress has the power and responsibility to authorize the use of military force and declare war. Congress has a duty of oversight. Congress must serve as a check, not a rubber stamp, to the President.”
“We face an authoritarian-minded president who acts with dangerous growing impunity. He has shown a willingness to defy court orders, violate the law, ignore congressional intent, and shred basic norms of decency and democracy. This pattern will continue unless the Article I branch of government, especially Republican congressional leadership, finds the courage to act.”
“What happened today [in Venezuela] is wrong. Congressional Republicans would say so immediately if a Democratic president had done the same. Their silence is surrender. And in that surrender lie the seeds of our democratic unraveling.”
“Enough is enough,” Booker concludes. With three years left in this administration, it’s time to stop the (constitutional) bleeding.
Senator Booker wrote at length at a time when many Americans have lost the will or the ability to take in an argument laid out like this. For some people, it’s easier to ignore common sense and stay in the fold of the cult. But Booker’s words are well worth our time and well worth sharing with others. His argument is not subtle or nuanced, and it’s accessible to anyone who has taken a fourth-grade civics class: Congress should do its job, not Donald Trump’s bidding. The future of the Republic depends upon it. They would demand it if a Democratic president had done what Donald Trump did—something that has been true over and over, but is all the more poignant with the anniversary of January 6 staring us in the face. Maybe Congress will remember what that day felt like and how they reacted. Maybe enough of them can muster some courage—if for no other reason than that the history books, and likely voters at the midterms, will condemn them if they don’t.
Make sure you share Senator Booker’s message with your elected officials this week. They need to hear it. They need to know you heard it.
A final note: a development we won’t be following this week, because it won’t be happening, is the federal criminal trial of former FBI Director Jim Comey, which was slated to start on Monday. This trial will not take place because the case was dismissed, in a serious blow to the credibility of Pam Bondi’s Justice Department. There are, in fact, some guardrails that remain in place. And this year, we’re going to rebuild more of them. Get ready to vote.
Where you get your news and analysis is a choice. I’m very appreciative that you’re here, with me, at Civil Discourse. Your subscriptions make it possible for me to devote the time and resources it takes to research and write the newsletter, and I’m very grateful for all of you. This is what community looks like.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
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