This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 5 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Welcome, everybody.

This is Perry Bacon. And this is The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Leah Greenberg. She’s the co-executive director of Indivisible, which has organized many important rallies and mobilizations against the administration, both from 2017 to 2020 [and] also last year. Leah, great to see you. Welcome.

Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.

Bacon: So I want to talk to you about what happened over the weekend. I’ve talked to some political scientists and scholars, but just like ... why should Americans be concerned that the U.S. government grabbed the leader of a foreign nation without congressional authorization over the weekend?

In layman’s terms, why is this bad? Maduro is not a good person. He lost an election but stayed in power. So why should we be concerned about this?

Greenberg: Look, if the last couple of decades have taught us anything, it is that ill-conceived, aggressive foreign policy interventions into places that we’re fully unprepared to be involved in have enormously horrifying consequences, both for the places that we’re intervening [in] and their people, and for the American people. We have been in multiple decades of these endless wars that are wars of choice that have been activated by American governments with no real sense of what they’re getting into.

And this is perhaps the most ill-conceived, most illegal, most immoral [action] in recent history. This is just an absolutely wild, completely, fundamentally crazy decision to go in and try to execute a gunboat diplomacy-style attack on Venezuela in a period when Americans are crying out for us to address challenges at home. What I would say is that we should all have learned important lessons about what it means to destabilize another country or region without a plan. And also, this is just another demonstration of the fact that Donald Trump does not consider himself constrained by any domestic or foreign law, and will simply put his craziest ideas into action without taking seriously the consequences for anyone.

Bacon: You used the phrase “most illegal.” Explain why, because ...

Greenberg: Let me walk that one back. But it is a wildly illegal series of events. Now, I think that is important. I think that should be part of an ongoing process of investigation and examination of exactly what happened, what decisions were made, who was responsible.

And also, I think that it’s possible sometimes for us as Democrats to go down this rabbit hole where we’re talking about the constitutional authorities. The problem is—it’s a big problem that Congress was not consulted before Donald Trump decided to go to war. It’s also a big problem that this is a crazy, terrible idea. Congress, had they been consulted, should have said no—

Bacon: And I’m guessing these things are tied and that this is so radical and so crazy, if Congress had been asked, it never would’ve happened.

Greenberg: One would certainly hope. If you think about the congressional history here, we got very, very close to a War Powers Resolution on the attacks—on the ongoing series of attacks........

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