Venezuela, Presidential Power, and the Republic We’re Supposed to Be Keeping

On January 3, the United States launched a military operation in Venezuela. A Delta Force unit captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. They were transported to the United States, where Maduro now faces indictment for drug trafficking.

The reaction was instant and predictable. Democrats cried constitutional crisis. Republicans closed ranks behind the president. Cable news filled the screen with the familiar choreography: outrage, defense, counter-outrage.

But taglines are cheap. And they are rarely clarifying.

If we’re serious—if we actually care about the Republic rather than our team—we have to ask harder questions. Not who do you support, but what system are you defending? And more to the point: what system have we slowly allowed to erode?

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The Constitution as Operating System

Americans love to speak reverently about the Founders, but we are far less attentive to what they actually built. The Declaration of Independence may be the poetry of the American experiment, but the Constitution is its engineering. It is not a statement of ideals; it is a mechanism—an operating system designed for flawed human beings.

James Madison understood this better than most. Trained by a Presbyterian minister, Madison did not share the Enlightenment’s rosy assumptions about human nature. He believed power must be divided precisely because it will otherwise be abused. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

So the Founders gave us three branches:

• A legislature to make the laws
• An executive to carry them out
• A judiciary to referee disputes

No kings. No Caesars. No shortcuts.

And yet—from the very beginning—presidents have pushed against those guardrails.

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When Power Discovers Its Appetite

Andrew Jackson did not ask Congress before removing Native American nations from their land. When the Supreme Court ruled against him, he ignored the decision. The result was the Trail of Tears.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. The courts objected. He overruled them anyway. His justification was blunt and unsettling: If I must bend the Constitution to save it, I will.

That sentence should make every American uneasy—even those who admire Lincoln. Because it reveals the perennial temptation of executive power: the belief that necessity absolves authority.

From Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal expansion of executive action, to Cold War interventions in Latin America, presidents have repeatedly acted first and asked permission later—if at all.

Sometimes the results were defensible. Sometimes they were disastrous. But the pattern remained consistent: presidential power grows most easily when Congress looks the other way.

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Congress: The Missing Branch

This brings us to the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the Venezuela debate.

Yes—strictly speaking—the president likely exceeded constitutional authority. There was no declaration of war. There was no explicit congressional authorization.

But here is the harder question: why has Congress allowed this pattern to become normal?

For decades, legislators of both parties have been content to outsource responsibility. War powers. Treaty powers. Emergency powers. All quietly ceded to the executive—until the moment a president from the other party uses them.

At that point, suddenly, the Constitution is rediscovered. The whistle is blown. Indignation erupts.

But you don’t get to abandon your post for thirty years and then pretend to be shocked when the building catches fire.

If Congress believes a president has violated the Constitution, it has tools. Serious tools. Impeachment is not theater—it is a constitutional mechanism. But that requires courage, consensus, and a willingness to own consequences.

Sniping from the sidelines is easier.

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The Second Question We Avoid

There is a second issue in play, and it may be even more important than the constitutional one: Was this good policy?

American history offers no simple answer.

Vietnam stands as a warning—a manufactured pretext leading to a quagmire that scarred a generation. Grenada and Panama, by contrast, are often cited as limited interventions that achieved their stated goals.

So where does Venezuela fall?

That is not a partisan question. It is a prudential one. It requires humility, historical memory, and an honest reckoning with unintended consequences. Those qualities are in short supply in modern politics.

What makes many Americans nervous is not merely the action itself, but the familiarity of the script. The ease with which military force is deployed. The speed with which complexity is flattened into slogans. The absence of sustained debate before lives and nations are disrupted.

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“A Republic, If You Can Keep It”

At the close of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the delegates had created. His answer remains one of the most sobering sentences in American history:

A republic—if you can keep it.

Keeping it requires more than winning elections. It requires institutional seriousness. It requires branches of government that actually perform their assigned roles. And it requires citizens willing to resist the narcotic pull of tribal loyalty.

The Venezuela operation is not just about Venezuela. It is a stress test—for Congress, for the presidency, and for the public.

Do we want constitutional limits only when they restrain our opponents?

Do we want energetic leadership without accountability?

Do we want safety without structure?

These questions are uncomfortable. They don’t fit neatly on a placard or in a tweet. But they are the questions a republic must ask if it intends to survive.

Everything else is—quite literally—fair game.

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