Democrats Are Doing What They Do Best on Venezuela: Nothing

In a colossal show of both imperial hubris and reality-TV-grade carelessness, America’s ruling regime has kidnapped a world leader and his wife and ordered them to go to trial on overblown charges of “narcoterrorism” (together with menacing-sounding but ultimately vacuous offenses such as being in possession of machine guns, which much of the MAGA movement regards as a sacred duty). Efforts to justify the action veer wildly from gangster-style resource extraction to the assertion of a new brand of hemispheric hegemony, while supposed plans to “run the country” on a puppet-colonial basis are plainly nonexistent. (Fittingly enough, the administration’s newly designated point-person in the arrangement is reportedly the racist thug who’s overseen a vastly unpopular and counterproductive federal siege of terror over US cities the administration doesn’t like.) In a symbolic flourish that says everything, the real proximate cause of the illegal coup appears to be the deposed leader’s habit of posting videos of himself dancing to troll America’s fathomlessly petty and dance-challenged maximum leader.

All of this would present a series of prime targets for a robust and engaged opposition party—particularly since one effective (if also bogus) plank of the MAGA movement’s mass appeal has been its professed allergy to America’s “forever wars” and the myopic military actions that provoked them. If only we had such a party. Instead, we have the Democratic Party. And what are the Democrats doing to call out the rapaciousness and the self-dealing hypocrisy of the Republican ruling caste? So far, as little as possible.

The central complaint from Democratic leaders has been that the Trump White House didn’t properly consult Congress in advance of its crime spree. And even that grievance rings hollow. Thus far, Democrats have shown no inclination to pursue an impeachment resolution against the president—the clear constitutional remedy for such abuses—even as a growing chorus of lawmakers are calling for it, together with leaders of the party’s activist base.

It’s safe to assume that party leaders will continue to brush aside calls for impeachment and other measures of accountability for the Trump regime’s brigandry—that is, after all, exactly what happened when Trump conducted his illegal bombing attack on Iran last summer. And the Democratic caucus failed to get traction behind a pair of earlier resolutions to curb the administration’s lawless military adventurism against Venezuela, even as a handful of dissident Republicans backed them.

The sorry record of party leaders on Trump’s brazen defiance of the Constitution’s war powers provisions reinforces the major liability that afflicts Democrats ahead of a critical midterm cycle: that they simply aren’t serious about making good on their many rhetorical denunciations of the Trumpified GOP’s lurch into cultlike authoritarian rule.

Sadly, the party’s inert approach to illegitimate acts of war well predates Trump’s Venezuela rampage; leading Democrats sat on their hands while their own president backed a genocidal war in Gaza—a lockstep posture of complicity so deeply ingrained that the Democratic National Committee refused to let any Palestinian speaker take the stage at the party’s 2024 convention. Democrats likewise enthusiastically hailed Barack Obama’s raid in Pakistan to kidnap and execute Osama bin Laden with little thought that it would serve as a precedent for later imperial errands like Maduro’s ouster.

Some of this self-inflicted myopia can be traced to one variant or another of “the Vietnam syndrome”—the dread of appearing out of step with bellicose public opinion during one of the country’s countless acts of imperial plunder masquerading as a national security crisis. That was the feeble lamentation from a trio of centrist House Democrats in a recent report in Axios, one of the party establishment’s favorite clearinghouses for anonymous left-bashing. One said that Democratic criticism of the MAGA putsch in Venezuela “looks weak…. If you don’t acknowledge when there is a win for our country, you lose all credibility.” Warming to the strains of such do-nothing centrist lullabies, another lawmaker said, “As Democrats, we can’t just condemn what happened.… I wish the Democratic Party would be a little bit more measured on this.” Still another misunderstood soul complained that “everything Trump touches must be bad according to the base.” It’s worth noting that none of these heroic dissenters spoke on the record—a weaselly maneuver that’s far weaker than principled opposition to an unlawful and unprovoked violation of another nation’s sovereignty.

At a time when the MAGA creed is poised to project itself wantonly across the Western Hemisphere, these maundering statements aren’t just self-serving bromides—they’re a plea to be spared the work of actually doing politics. As Democrats gear up to make the case that they should be granted control of Congress to stave off the power grabs, racist internment campaigns, and crimes of the second Trump White House, the last thing they should be doing is to bypass the essential task of drawing firm and principled distinctions between their own agenda and that of the thuggish opposition they have deemed an existential threat to American democracy. Yet that is precisely the reflex of the party’s leadership. It’s why virtually every statement on the Venezuela raid issued from the sanctums of Democratic power starts with the denunciation of Maduro as an illegitimate dictator—as though that makes an American-led kidnapping-and-coup campaign somehow more palatable. To make the case that even antidemocratic foreign leaders should be shielded from externally engineered coups is to mount a political argument—a vindication of basic guidelines of conduct for any self-professed republic. And making that argument means countenancing resistance, hazarding electoral risks, and refashioning your party’s organizing convictions on more coherent and legible lines.

Democratic leaders have demonstrated again and again that they can’t be bothered with any of that. Instead, they’re poised to treat the Venezuelan travesty as they have most of the other power grabs, crimes, and corrupt bargains of the Trump era—as something that can be safely left untended until it passively ripens into an opportunity to eke out a narrow clutch of wins in the next electoral cycle. In that spirit, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer took to the bully pulpit of Morning Joe on Monday to preach bipartisan backing for another war powers resolution to prevent further incursions into Venezuela without advance notification to Congress. Never mind that the Democrats failed to advance their past two such resolutions. And never mind that Schumer’s appeal to his GOP colleagues was flat-out hallucinatory: “If there was ever a time, [Republicans] must step up to the plate. This is the time. And if they don’t, they’re gonna feel the heat from their constituents.”

In other words: The opposition party that continually rules out impeachment as a viable strategy is banking on lawmakers aligned with a ruling party that’s systematically purged and primaried anti-MAGA dissidents from its ranks to rescue flailing Democratic bids to get illegal war plans duly set down on paper before the concerned principals on Capitol Hill. That’s the polar opposite of politics—and it is most decidedly weak.