Sens. Josh Hawley and Jerry Moran stand against Trump. Will it last? | Opinion
If President Donald Trump is going to be restrained from trying to take over half the world over the next few years, it will take pushback from Republicans like Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Jerry Moran of Kansas to stop him.
Bizarrely enough, that pushback could happen.
Hawley was one of five Republicans to join Democrats on Thursday in a vote to force Trump to seek congressional approval before taking any additional military action against Venezuela after last weekend’s operation to remove the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, from power.
And yes, the Missourian’s vote came as a surprise to observers.
“To me, this is all about going forward,” Hawley told reporters Thursday morning. “If the president should determine, ‘You know what? I need to put troops on the ground in Venezuela,’ I think that would require Congress to weigh in.”
That means Hawley wasn’t voting so much against war in Venezuela as he was voting to preserve Congress’ constitutional power to declare war. But it’s a vote that defies Trump’s own expansive sense of presidential authority — he will likely veto the resolution — which might bring the already-simmering conflict between Hawley and the White House to a head.
The vote by Hawley and his four GOP colleagues “greatly hampers American Self Defense and National Security,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The four senators “should never be elected to office again.”
Which makes it likely we’ll hear more about this particular incident in the future.
Who would have guessed?
Moran didn’t join Hawley on the Venezuela vote. But Thursday’s news came a day after the Kansan tried to put the kibosh on Trump’s dreams of taking Greenland from Denmark — perhaps by force.
“There should be no invasion of Greenland,” Moran told The Hill. “Denmark is an ally, a NATO ally.”
So Moran wants to preserve NATO. Hawley wants to save Congress, at least a little bit. The question in both cases, though: Are they too late?
Will Moran cross Trump?
Moran is one of the last of the old-school Reaganite Republicans who are invested in apparently outdated notions like America being a defender of democracy around the world. The GOP these days looks a lot more like Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who has argued against defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion but also — just this week — made the case for going out and using American power to subjugate Venezuela and Greenland.
So it’s no surprise that Moran’s comments on Greenland this week were couched in preserving America’s most historic military alliance. The Kansas senator a few years ago was appointed to the Senate’s NATO Observer Group, which promotes America’s ties to the treaty organization.
The GOP has moved on from its old devotions. Moran hasn’t.
“I think NATO is important to the stability of the world and the free world … and I think it’s particularly important now as we’ve been asking Europeans to up their support for Ukraine that we don’t get crosswise with NATO,” he told The Hill.
The question is if Moran is willing — as Hawley was on Thursday — to cross Trump to make that clear.
I asked his office on Thursday if he would be willing to vote for a proposed resolution from Sen. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, to restrain the president from taking military action against Greenland.
“Deliberation of a war powers resolution is one of the most consequential responsibilities of the Senate,” his office told me in a statement. “A war powers resolution on Greenland has not yet been introduced, and Sen. Moran will weigh any war powers action based upon the facts and current circumstances at the time of consideration.”
So the answer is: We don’t know yet what Moran is willing to do.
It’s not clear, at any rate, that NATO can be saved. Trump has always been plain about his disdain for the treaty. Alliances depend on trust, and how can America be trusted if it is threatening to take military action against one of its partners?
As for Hawley: It is also not clear that Trump is much inclined to defer to Congress — or the Constitution — when it comes to mounting splendid little wars abroad.
So it’s true that Trump won’t be stopped unless Republicans like Moran and Hawley help stop him. We can be glad they are registering their opposition. The problem? It still might not be enough.