Last chance? Congressional Republicans have a choice to make

There is so much to unpack still from the military strike on or near Caracas that killed dozens of people, including civilians, all as part of the goal of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. There is the flouting of international conventions and political norms; the lack of communication with Congress; the fact that the strike plan was leaked to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and they chose to say nothing about the illegal action; the way that 47 and his regime insisted they would take control of the country even though they literally have no plan ready to do so; the way 47 claimed the vice president (now interim president of Venezuela) was on board to bend to U.S. will when in fact she said quite the opposite (showing that while we may be able to execute military missions, we don’t know how to do war anymore with frat boys in charge); and so much more…

…Including the fact that our president and his crew made it clear that in the wake of this attack on Venezuela and our blatant regime change intentions and plans to seize the country’s resources that they are now setting their sights on Colombia, Cuba, and even Mexico. To add to the fun, 47 once again reiterated his intent to possess Greenland, a territory of one of our NATO allies, and it hasn’t been that long since he’s expressed his dream of Canada as the 51^st state, too. I haven’t seen mention of Panama for a while, but let’s not forget his desire to control the Panama Canal was a big thing early last year.

I say all of this to catch you up to speed on most (I think) of the high points as I say that congressional Republicans are quite possibly facing their last chance to do something remotely right.

Believe me, I’m not hopeful that they will, but I do think it’s important to note that they still can do something meaningful to push back against the United States becoming an authoritarian rogue state. They could and they might.

So far, the GOP has pretty much let the tangerine tyrant have free reign, and that’s in large part because so much of what he has done has met their desires and goals for a cis-het, white supremacist, evangelical Christian patriarchy. But we now stand on the brink of being a literal invasive, empire-building, global menace. Yeah, the United States has been doing regime change in Latin America and other places around the world for many, many decades, but this is new. This is takeover stuff. That is openly and without any façade or veneer looking to seize whatever we want on a whim.

I saw people posting online this weekend rumors that this week might see Congress enact a War Powers Act to rein in the administration in terms of Venezuela and perhaps other sovereign nations we have our eyes on. It wouldn’t surprise me, because there are some Republicans getting nervous. We saw four of them break ranks with the GOP to force a vote on ACA supplements recently, because they knew their seats could be vulnerable when they come up for re-election. I know it’s popular to say things online like, “Bold of you to think we’ll have midterm elections this year or ever again” or to point out that 47 may be stirring up war and domestic unrest just to declare martial law and put an end to elections.

But if there are a growing number of Republicans fearing they might be voted out of office, that suggests that they still believe elections are going to happen, which probably means a lot of them don’t want an authoritarian state, no matter how much they love most of what 47 has wrought so far in terms of immigration aggression, decreasing women’s rights, marginalizing transgender people and more. They expect elections to happen, and a growing number of them realize that the tangerine regime is moving very fast, doing a whole lot, and not being subtle at all—in ways that might hurt them.

Even with Democrats largely being ineffectual and seeming paralyzed, many Republicans know that the increasing right-wing fervor in 2025, which reached a fever pitch by the middle and end of the year, could easily hand a lot of House and Senate seats to Dems. The Democrats may not be doing much to look heroic or useful and they aren’t seizing on messaging, but the fact is that as things get worse, a lot of “centrists” and “swing voters” and even avowed Republican voters could easily see voting in a lot of Democrats as essential to slowing down the madness of the administration.

The kind of concerns being stoked now could move voters so much that gerrymandering, messing with mail-in ballots, and rigging voting machines might not be enough to prevent Congress from going into Democratic hands.

And that’s where we come to this Rubicon—this decision-making point of no return. Republicans in Congress need to decide if they are going to exert any of their power and do any of their jobs, or just give in to having a dictator and rubber-stamping his decrees.

At the bare minimum, they have to do something to halt what’s going on in Venezuela, because it’s more than just our usual regime change or our usual attempt to control other nations’ resources. We’ve done both before so many times, and its almost always had hugely negative effects long term, but this Venezuela thing is so bold and overt and obvious that it threatens to upend the United Nations, NATO, and any semblance of balance and order globally.

Better yet, they need to reel the “peace president” in on these attacks in other countries too and his blatant attempts to try to forge some U.S. empire in the Americas, because we’re threatening allies now, too.

But best of all would be impeachment and removal. I know that sounds like a pipe dream and it likely is, but it is still feasible. I know people like to say online, “he’s been impeached twice; it doesn’t work.” Well, yeah, it didn’t work because impeachment is only half the process. Saying impeachment doesn’t work because the president is still in office is like saying indictments and grand juries don’t work because the prosecution wasn’t able to secure a conviction. Both impeachments came from a Democrat-controlled House and it was the Republican-controlled Senate that refused to declare Trump “guilty” and remove him from the Oval Office.

There are so many things to impeach him over right now, even what he just did in kidnapping a sitting head of state. Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for getting blowjobs from a legal adult in the White House; they didn’t succeed in removing him from office, but it shows just how little you need to impeach if you have the will.

The problem is GOP support of 47 no matter what. But what he’s doing now is literally hurting our nation and savaging our reputation, and what will Republicans have to reap soon aside from owing the libs? You can’t spend that. They probably won’t impeach, but they could join with Democrats to secure impeachment and removal from office, and the best thing for the Republicans, whether they are right-wing or “moderate” if they did it?

They would still have all those gains 47’s regime got them; gains in oppression and regression that the Democrats couldn’t probably fix appreciably any time soon. That’s how much damage has been done. More importantly, the Republicans would still entirely be in control if they removed 47 from office. For at least the next three years they would control the White House and the Supreme Court and quite possibly continue to control both houses of Congress after the midterms.

Because they would be heroes. I don’t know if they see it; I don’t know if they understand it. But the GOP would be heroes to most of the nation if they helped remove 47 from office, and what are angry MAGA loyalists to the president going to do in the voting booths? Continue voting Republican. They have no other option, and they aren’t likely to form some viable right-wing third party. An impeachment and removal is something the GOP could spin as doing a hard thing for the good of the nation, and the Dems would probably not fare well in the midterm elections. It’s not going to happen, most likely. I will count us lucky if congressional Republicans merely control the international damage and prevent us from being a global pariah and being economically isolated to the point the Great Depression will look like child’s play.

We are rapidly approaching having dictatorial rule in the United States, and I don’t know if the GOP at large fully appreciates how much power the Supreme Court and Congress have ceded already. One thing is certain though: We know the GOP is still concerned about elections, so they believe we still have some kind of functioning democracy. But if they do nothing at all to rein in 47, that probably means one of two things: Either they are fully on board with what the tangerine tyrant is doing and are willing to let him go to any extreme, or they are too terrified to go against him because they already have accepted the notion that 47 holds all the power and will punish all of them.

Neither is a very attractive option, because we need some grown-ups in charge, and I’m seeing precious few of them right now.

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