Happy Monday morning.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — A bipartisan group of lawmakers who traveled here on an urgent mission to reassure Danish leaders amid President Donald Trump’s escalating threats to acquire Greenland had a straightforward message.
In an interview between high-level meetings, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin summed it up this way: “Give us a chance to give [Trump] a way out of this that comes to the right ending.”
Durbin added: “I don’t know if that’s possible.”
The four-decade veteran of Congress, who’s been on dozens of CODELs, wasn’t just referring to Trump’s apparent determination to take over the Danish territory at all costs, or Republicans’ hesitation to openly defy him. Durbin was giving a sobering assessment of Congress as a supposedly coequal branch of government.
Over the span of several decades and under the leadership of both parties, lawmakers have ceded their authority to the executive branch on everything from war powers to tariffs to the power of the purse. Hill leaders have prioritized avoiding politically difficult votes or been slow to react – or done nothing – as presidents repeatedly pushed the limits of their own power at the expense of Congress.
“It’s not just this moment or this president,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who co-led the delegation. “What makes this moment so hard is, if Congress can’t stand up in the face of something where there is no strategic value and lots of strategic harm…is Congress really willing to exert its authority at all?”
That’s what made this particular CODEL so uniquely difficult — and surreal.
The two-day visit was intended to convey Congress’ and the American public’s opposition to Trump’s Greenland push. But lawmakers were openly grappling with whether they could credibly reassure an ally that the United States won’t violate the territorial sovereignty of a NATO member.
The consequences extend far beyond the potential unraveling of NATO. In many ways, this particular CODEL was an example of Congress trying to confront a monster it helped create: An institution so feeble that constitutional checks and balances are no longer an effective reassurance.
“Yeah, Donald Trump concerns me, but what really concerns me is our willingness to give it up because we don’t want to make hard decisions,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks (N.Y.), the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s top Democrat.
Their Danish counterparts are frustrated too. Flemming Møller Mortensen, one of the parliamentarians who met with the U.S. delegation, told us that while reassurances are meaningful, that’s far from a promise.
Next steps. As tens of thousands of people lined the streets of Copenhagen Saturday to protest Trump’s threats toward Greenland, the president announced he planned to impose new tariffs on Denmark and seven other European nations for opposing his drive to acquire Greenland.
It’s an example not only of Trump exploiting Congress’ decades-long ceding of power to the executive branch, but also of his own party’s unwillingness to push back on him, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said in an interview.
“You always rationalize the expedient when your person is in power. And we’re doing that now,” said Tillis, the co-leader of the delegation. “The Danes are relieved to know we’re here. But really, what can we do?”
Tillis, who’s retiring and has been at odds with Trump a lot lately, predicted that if the president follows through on the tariffs as a method of coercion, more Republicans will speak out.
But the jury’s still out on that. GOP lawmakers thinking of bucking Trump will certainly recall his targeting of the five Republicans who voted to advance a Venezuela war powers resolution.
Meanwhile, Durbin is wary at this moment of a congressional vote on a measure intended to rein in Trump on Greenland.
“It’s a high-risk strategy. If you try and it fails, it really opens the door for [Trump] to do unilaterally what he wants to do,” Durbin added.
A war powers vote on Greenland could also be problematic. Senate Republicans used a procedural tactic to kill the Venezuela war powers resolution last week by arguing that there are no active hostilities there.
“If you exercise a point of order first to say there’s no hostility here — which there isn’t, and we want to keep it that way — it’s now different, isn’t it?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), one of just a few Republicans who joined Democrats on that vote, told us.
‘American Idiot.’ The issue is so intensely animating Danes that multiple people approached Tillis on the streets of Copenhagen and specifically referenced his Senate floor speech slamming Trump’s Greenland threats.
But the lawmakers witnessed a level of anti-Americanism that stunned and depressed them. Tillis warned it could lead to retaliatory measures aimed at the United States if Trump persists.
Durbin said they learned during a meeting with business leaders that there’s an app many Europeans are now using to identify which consumer products come from the United States so they can avoid them. “It’s not an unreasonable response,” Durbin added.
Tillis recalled listening to broadcast radio in his hotel room.
“You know what song they were playing? Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ — which incidentally is a really good song,” Tillis quipped. “But I don’t think it was just because it was on the rotation.”
— Andrew Desiderio