#war powers

Republicans reverse course on war powers vote and give Trump unchecked authority in Venezuela

Two Republicans flipped their votes after intense pressure from Trump.

Jan. 14, 2026, 6:36 PM EST

By Mychael Schnell

When five Senate Republicans voted with Democrats last week to advance a resolution to restrict President Donald Trump’s military authority in Venezuela, it looked like a significant rebuke of the administration.

Now, a week later — after two Republicans flipped their votes following intense lobbying from Trump and the White House — it looks like the latest example of GOP lawmakers bowing to the president.

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans approved a procedural gambit to block the Venezuela war powers resolution from getting a final vote, stopping the bipartisan effort dead in its tracks after it appeared headed for success.

Jesse Duquette

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Oregon's Bay Area 

Good morning. Today’s roundup is not about one bad decision or one unhinged post, it’s about a governing philosophy that treats human life, scientific reality, and the future itself as expendable inconveniences.

Let’s start where Trump did: with a dead woman and a social media verdict. In a Truth Social post, Trump responds to the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE with the reflexes of a man who has never once paused to ask whether power should be restrained. Before investigations conclude, before facts are established, before a family has even buried their loved one, Trump declares the officer acted in “self-defense” and uses the death as a prop in a broader threat narrative.

In video after video from the scene, you can hear the atmosphere Trump is feeding, voices yelling “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” shouts of rage and expulsion echoing as authority asserts itself through force. This is the context he chooses to amplify, not interrogate.

He labels another woman at the scene a “professional agitator,” while smearing Good herself as erratic and crazed, a cowardly sleight of hand from a man who cannot defend power without first stripping its victims of humanity. One woman is cast as a provocation, the other as collateral damage, and the officer is cleared before the body is cold.

This is the moral emptiness at the core of Trumpism: cruelty reframed as order, expulsion mistaken for strength, and state violence sanctified by the simple act of declaring it justified fast enough.Not only did they deny Renee Nicole Good due process, but they also exploited her and transformed her into social media content. That instinct, act first, erase accountability, move on, is everywhere else this administration touches.

On Wednesday, Trump quietly withdrew the United States from 66 international organizations and treaties, including the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s not trimming bureaucracy. That’s ripping out the load-bearing walls of global cooperation. The UNFCCC is the backbone of coordinated climate action. The IPCC is the scientific body that tells governments what’s actually happening to the planet. Trump didn’t just walk away from the Paris Agreement again, he pulled the U.S. out of the entire system, making America the only country on Earth outside the framework.

When the climate crisis is accelerating, Trump’s solution is ignorance with confidence. Fire the scientists, delete the assessments, dismantle research institutions, and withdraw from international bodies. Then, like a toddler covering its eyes and assuming invisibility is mutual, he declares victory over “alarmism.” The science doesn’t disappear, it just stops constraining policy.

Right on cue, once climate accountability is gone, the menu changes. Enter RFK Jr.’s shiny new inverted food pyramid, unveiled with the enthusiasm of someone who just discovered steak knives. Red meat, cheese, and saturated fat are now perched proudly at the top, framed as a bold reset and an end to the “war on saturated fats.” Never mind decades of nutritional research. Never mind cardiovascular risk. And certainly never mind the climate implications of elevating beef and dairy, two of the most methane-intensive sectors on the planet, at the exact moment Trump is gutting climate science.

RFK, Jr is literally laundering industry interests through culture war rhetoric. Ultra-processed foods are a problem, yes, but the answer is not to replace them with an industrial livestock model that accelerates emissions, land destruction, and water depletion. The climate piece is conspicuously missing because acknowledging it would require admitting that food systems, energy policy, and environmental collapse are connected. Trump’s governing style depends on pretending they’re not.

While Trump torches climate treaties and tells Americans the future is steak and denial, he’s also playing sanctions roulette with Venezuelan oil, threatening, posturing, and carving out exceptions as needed. Think fossil fuel leverage disguised as foreign policy. Venezuela becomes a pressure valve when markets tighten and allies resist. No long-term strategy. No democratic coherence. Just extraction, improvisation, and power concentration in the executive.

That’s why Congress suddenly cares about war powers again. The Senate is preparing to vote on a resolution to block further U.S. military action in Venezuela without explicit congressional authorization, a posture that would have sounded theoretical just a few months ago but now feels urgent. Lawmakers from both parties, including Kentucky Republican Rand Paul and Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Tim Kaine, have pushed a War Powers resolution aimed at reasserting Congress’s constitutional authority over declarations of war after the administration’s surprise military operation in Venezuela and continued strikes in the region raised alarms about executive overreach.

The move is not about rediscovering some long-lost love of the Constitution; it is about political and legal self-defense. Members of Congress have been told one thing behind closed doors, that there would be no regime-change invasion, and then watched the administration launch exactly that, capturing Nicolás Maduro and seizing oil tankers, triggering accusations that lawmakers were misled and that the president exceeded his authority.

Even when earlier war powers resolutions failed, like a bipartisan effort late last year that fell 49–51 on procedural grounds, they showed a track of growing unease with lethal actions taken without clear statutory backing.

This isn’t a clean constitutional revival. It’s a reaction to executive unilateralism taken to an extreme: militarily intervening across a hemisphere without pre-existing authorization, offering thin legal justifications, and then pushing onward. The Senate vote on Thursday, which could see Republican defections, is Congress trying to remind the executive branch that the power to send Americans into harm’s way doesn’t belong to one person alone.

In another flicker of resistance and against the wishes of Speaker Mike Johnson, the House is moving to vote on renewing enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that expired at the end of last year, sending premiums spiking for millions. Republican leadership tried to bury it. Rank-and-file members forced it onto the floor with a discharge petition, legislative mutiny by paperwork. A clean three-year extension is expected to pass the House, even as the Senate hems and haws over a slimmer, compromised version. Is it perfect? No. Is it fragile? Absolutely. But it matters.

Health insurance is where all of this finally collides. Climate chaos drives inflation. Energy volatility raises costs. Market instability hits premiums. And suddenly the abstract destruction shows up as a very real notice saying your coverage just got more expensive, or disappeared entirely. The ACA has always survived this way, not through grand consensus but through moments when enough lawmakers realize the cruelty has gone too far to ignore.

Trump is a lame duck president in more ways than one. He governs as someone unmoored from consequence, acutely aware that he will never be held accountable for the wreckage he leaves behind, and uninterested in the future beyond his own reflection. He acts with the recklessness of a man who knows he will not be the one living with the results.

Trump governs like someone addicted to instant gratification, chasing the next surge of dominance while scorning any structure that asks him to think past the moment. Constraints are tyranny, evidence is optional, and the future is a nuisance to be ignored. Whether it’s ICE on the street, carbon in the atmosphere, beef on the plate, oil in Venezuela, or insurance in your mailbox, the message is the same: power decides, consequences are deferred, and empathy is weakness.

There is still a chance to rescue the ACA, just as there are still people trying to pull the emergency brake on climate collapse and unauthorized war. But those chances exist despite this president, not because of him. They survive in the cracks around his authority, and will only grow if we provide enough pressure.

Aaron Parnas

turning an active war into a branding exercise and raising bigger questions

about executive power

Congress

and who gets to declare a war nearly over while it’s still happening.

Emily Singer at Daily Kos:

President Donald Trump’s boondoggle of a war in Iran officially hit the 60-day mark on Friday, thus requiring him—by law—to get congressional approval to continue his hostilities. But Trump and his administration came up with a bullshit excuse for why the War Powers Resolution of 1973 doesn’t apply to them in this situation.

“We are in a ceasefire right now, which our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses, or stops, in a ceasefire,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told senators on Thursday during a hearing on Capitol Hill. “That’s our understanding, just so you know.” Of course, that’s not how this works.

The law explicitly says that “within sixty calendar days” of the conflict, Trump must “terminate any use of United States Armed Forces” unless Congress “has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces.”  The word “ceasefire” does not appear anywhere in the law’s text. “I do not believe the statute would support that,” Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, who has been leading the charge to pass a war powers resolution since the conflict began, told Hegseth at the hearing.

However, the Trump administration knows that seeking congressional approval bears risk. First, a war powers resolution would put GOP lawmakers on the record supporting the war, and an ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Friday found the war to be overwhelmingly unpopular. Putting Republicans on the record would give Democrats a clear-cut line of attack in this year’s midterm elections, which are looking to be a disaster for Republicans. 

[...] Iran is still controlled by a repressive and radical theological regime. Its nuclear program is not obliterated. And Iran is actually profiting from this mess, given that they now have control over the Strait of Hormuz, which they did not have before this war began.