The White House has reveled in the success of Operation Absolute Resolve, the covert mission through which Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped and whisked to the United States. The operation involved more than 150 aircraft, multiple branches of the U.S. armed forces, and, notably, resulted in no loss of American life.

Maduro is not a sympathetic figure. He has presided over a corrupt and dictatorial regime, clinging to power through electoral fraud and the violent suppression of political opposition. What, then, is not to like about his removal?

Yet for a country that claims a commitment to constitutional government, there is much to lament in President Trump’s increasingly Maduro-esque assumption of power.

The Framers of the Constitution were deliberate in assigning the war powers to Congress rather than to the president. This choice represented a clear rejection of the British model, in which the monarch was understood, in the words of jurist William Blackstone, to be the “generalissimo” of the kingdom. Under that system, the king was expected to unify the strength of the realm in his person and to deploy military force as he saw fit.

Americans, by contrast, insisted that decisions about war and military power rest with their elected representatives. Seven separate clauses in the Constitution assign Congress authority over declaring war and governing the armed forces.

Writing in the early 1790s, James Madison reflected on the Philadelphia Convention’s decision to vest the war power in the legislature. “In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found,” Madison wrote, “than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.” The temptation of foreign military adventures, he warned, “would be too great for any one man.”

Madison went further, describing war as “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” “It is in war,” he continued, “that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

But isn’t the president the commander-in-chief of the armed forces? Doesn’t that title itself grant broad authority to deploy the military as he sees fit?

He is commander-in-chief—but it does not.

The president holds that role for a specific purpose: to ensure civilian control over the military. When Congress declares war, the president, advised by senior generals and admirals, carries out the legislative decision to commit American forces to combat. Absent such a congressional directive, the president lacks constitutional authorization to initiate offensive military operations.

The Framers did, however, recognize that the executive must retain discretion to repel sudden attacks. Debates at the Philadelphia Convention reveal that Congress was initially granted the power to “make” rather than “declare” war. James Madison of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts proposed the revised language to ensure that the president could act swiftly if the nation were subjected to a surprise assault.

When President George Washington later confronted unrest involving settlers and the Creek Nation, he declined to authorize military action that went beyond strict defense. Washington had been urged by General Andrew Pickens to raise an army of five thousand men and launch an offensive against Creeks near the Georgia border. He rejected those proposals, pointing explicitly to constitutional limits. “[T]he Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress,” Washington observed; “therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorised such a measure.” Congress declined to do so, and Washington refrained from making war on the Creeks.

The current occupant of the White House would do well to heed Washington’s example. Venezuela has launched no surprise attack on the United States that would justify unilateral defensive action. It is true that large quantities of illegal drugs enter the country every day from Venezuela and other nations south of the U.S. border. But that reality presents a law-enforcement challenge, not a constitutional license for regime change.

Rather than striking a blow for freedom, the president’s usurpation of Congress’s powers pushes the United States closer to Maduro’s Venezuela and farther from the constitutional design the Framers so carefully constructed.