Trump Should Have Tried To Get Congressional Authorization If He Wanted To Strike Venezuela and Capture Maduro |
Venezuela
Eric Boehm | 1.3.2026 12:31 PM
The U.S. military strikes that targeted Venezuela on Saturday morning and the subsequent capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife may turn out to be popular or defensible, given Maduro's history of despotism and the legal indictments awaiting him in federal court.
What they were not, however, is legal.
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to approve military strikes against foreign countries. Federal laws, like the War Powers Resolution, allow for unilateral executive action only in response to an imminent threat against Americans or U.S. troops. That separation of powers is fundamental to American democracy—not an optional arrangement for presidents to discard when it is politically or logistically inconvenient.
At a press conference on Saturday morning, President Donald Trump termed the attack an "extraordinary military operation," which he claimed was unlike anything seen since World War II. Therefore, there should be no debate about what this was: a military strike, one that utterly lacked congressional authorization.
Trump also clarified that the U.S. would "run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition" to a new leader. "We are going to stay until such time as a........