Subject: 'Blind into Caracas'
Trump made the case for his own impeachment
Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and others tried to dance around what had happened by saying that the Maduro capture and relocation from Venezuela was a routine law-enforcement exercise. Nothing to see here! We’re just executing another drug-crime arrest warrant, though with unusual skill from the American forces.

Trump was having none of this pussyfooting. Perhaps without realizing he was doing so, he flatly and 100% contradicted what others at the microphone were claiming.

“We are going to run the country,” he said of Venezuela, with “we” meaning the United States. “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition… We’re going to stay and run it, essentially, until a proper transition can take place.” That is, until we decide to leave.

In the meantime, Trump said, he was “not afraid of boots on the ground.”

Good God.

This is an overthrow of a foreign government. It’s an act of war. It is an open-ended declaration of foreign occupation. And as all at the microphone either proudly declared and reluctantly admitted, it was pulled off without consultation with anyone outside their little circle.

That’s what’s impeachable. If Trump understood what he was saying, he was violating all concepts of checks-and-balances. If he didn’t understand, he is incapacitated.

It’s bad enough for Trump to disrupt the entire world trading system, at his whim, with one-man decisions to raise and lower tariffs. (As the Supreme Court might eventually get around to recognizing.) What he announced today is one man (plus his enablers) violating the Constitution of 1787, the War Powers Act of 1973, and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, all of which require a president to involve the Congress in war-and-peace decisions.

Yes, since the 1970s Congress has ceded too much territory to presidents in this area. But what Trump announced was not ceding territory. It was declaring, as Nero might have put it if he spoke French, l’etat, c’est moi.

Actual impeachment will go nowhere, in a quisling-run GOP Congress. But recognition that this is flat impeachable needs to become part of standard press and political discussion of what has just occurred. —James Fallows
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