The New York Times reports:

The Pentagon barred the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee from making an oversight visit to a military spy agency.

Armed forces off the coast of Venezuela began a military campaign against alleged members of a drug cartel without any authorization from Congress, and without notifying key members.

The White House informed Congress it planned to use a rare maneuver to skirt a vote and cancel nearly $5 billion in foreign aid funding that lawmakers had already approved, the latest escalation of its campaign to undercut the legislative branch’s spending powers.

And just a month after senators had confirmed her, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, ousted the director of the Centers for Disease Control. He also put forward changes that would effectively restrict access to Covid-19 vaccines, after pledging to senators during his own confirmation hearings that he would not make it more difficult.

The Trump administration continues to erode the power of Congress, trampling on its constitutional prerogatives in ways large and small. Through it all, Republicans in charge have mostly shrugged — and in some cases, outright applauded — as their powers, once jealously guarded, diminish in ways that will be difficult to reverse.

In recent weeks, G.O.P. leaders have looked on passively as the president has fired a litany of agency leaders whom senators worked for weeks to confirm, from the C.D.C. to the Internal Revenue Service to the Federal Reserve.

And they have shown little appetite for challenging the administration, even as a few have expressed occasional displeasure about the consequences of their decisions earlier this year to swallow their reservations about some of his nominees and confirm them.

“We have confirmed a vaccine denier,” Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, lamented during a hearing last week featuring Mr. Kennedy. “On tariffs, we’ve given up our constitutional responsibility. On appropriations, we’re bending the knee to an administration that is rescinding and deciding what to spend and what not to spend, despite the way our law, in a bipartisan way, was passed.”

“We cannot cede power,” Mr. Welch added. “There are consequences.”

For nearly a century, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have sought to amass more power, particularly to conduct foreign policy and military operations, and with a few exceptions, succeeded in chipping away at congressional influence. What is different now is the degree of disdain Mr. Trump has shown for Congress — and the willingness of G.O.P. leaders to defer to him even when it means undercutting their coequal branch of government.

“That is the big story here — not that a president is trying to push the bounds of their authority, because our system was designed with that in mind,” Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado and a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, said in an interview. “The true story is that Republicans in Congress have capitulated and are not pushing back to assert authority.” [Continue reading…]