By Sarah Ferris, CNN
(CNN) — Congress was already set to return this week to a slew of bitter policy fights and the threat of another government shutdown at the end of the month.
Now, lawmakers must confront enormous questions of authority and oversight over the US military after President Donald Trump seized and deposed Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro without telling them.
House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune will be forced to answer from some in their own party over whether to reassert the legislative branch’s role in war-making alongside critical votes on health care and government spending.
They face high stakes ahead of this fall’s midterms, as fury builds among GOP moderates whose political survival this November will determine the trajectory of Trump’s last two years in office.
In the House, Johnson is required to hold a floor vote on a Democratic proposal to resurrect those subsidies for three years, thanks to a rebellion from some of his own GOP centrists, who were irate over the expiration of tax credits that were going to millions of Americans. A Democratic leadership source said the bill has to come up this week under discharge petition rules.
Even if the House passes the bill to extend the credits, that doesn’t mean the Senate will do the same.
Senate centrists have been working on their own compromise bill for weeks, including during their winter recess. But their plans are a secret for now.
The Senate is set to vote on a measure to limit the president’s war powers in Venezuela. The vote had been in the works weeks before Maduro’s late-night capture and now becomes a major test of Republican loyalty to Trump after the operation.
Party leaders must also find a path to fund much of the federal government by month’s end. As lawmakers ended America’s longest-ever government shutdown in the fall, they punted most of the decisions on funding to January 30. That deadline is now fast approaching — but with very little of the progress that spending leaders had hoped to show by now.
And Democrats don’t appear to be in the mood for dealmaking.
“Nobody wants to compromise,” longtime Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri said just before leaving for the holidays, lamenting a broken system of governing in Washington that led to the Affordable Care Act subsidies lapse. “And democracy demands compromise.”
A vote on Trump’s war powers
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday that he and Sens. Tim Kaine and Rand Paul intend to put their war powers resolution on the Senate floor this week in an attempt to rein in the president from further attacks in Venezuela without congressional approval.
Schumer accused Trump of launching an “endless war” — violating Trump’s own campaign promises just months earlier. And he said the White House had yet to reveal how long American troops would be in Venezuela and how much it will ultimately cost.
Kaine said that the Trump administration had not indicated in previous briefings and memos that the purpose of its operation in Venezuela was regime change.
He added that for Congress to intervene and prevent further military actions in Venezuela, lawmakers should pass his War Powers Resolution or include language in the defense appropriations bill prohibiting additional military action.
“Many Republicans said, ‘Oh, the president’s not going to do it. He tells us, this is a bluff. He tells us this is a negotiating tactic,’ etc.,” Kaine told reporters Sunday. “OK, now it’s happening, and anybody who was pretending otherwise cannot pretend anymore.”
Trump administration officia