In a rebuke of President Donald Trump from lawmakers within his own party, the Senate on Jan. 8 advanced a bipartisan measure to halt further American military action in Venezuela without congressional approval.
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The war powers resolution, which cleared the procedural hurdle on a 52-47 vote, would reassert the role of Congress in engaging in hostilities with the Latin American country.
All Democrats and five Republicans – Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Todd Young of Indiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Josh Hawley of Missouri – supported it. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, did not vote.
The president immediately denounced the group of GOP lawmakers, saying in a social media post that they “should never be elected to office again.”
The measure’s success came after Trump’s Jan. 3 military incursion that included the bombing of the capital city of Caracas, capture of the country’s leader on narcoterrorism charges and a quarantine of the beleaguered nation’s oil reserves. While many global leaders have since celebrated the toppling of Nicolas Maduro, rampant questions remain about the legality of the Trump administration’s moves, both under American and international laws.
The Constitution gives Congress the ultimate power to declare war. But the White House has said the January operation was not the beginning of a war. Rather, administration officials have justified it as an execution of an American arrest warrant for Maduro, who has been wanted for years on drug charges. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the strike deposing the country’s leader, Trump pledged the U.S. would “run” Venezuela.
For decades, the legislative branch has slowly ceded its war-related authority to the executive branch. Starting to reverse that pattern was the ultimate goal of the measure, according to its main sponsor, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia. He plans to introduce more resolutions related to military action in other countries Trump has threatened.
Kaine, a veteran, has been unconvinced by the White House’s arguments that the January operation – and the months of strikes on alleged drug boats leading up to it – don’t amount to war.
“This was not the surgical execution of an arrest warrant,” he told reporters the day before the resolution went up for a vote. “It was much bigger than that.”
Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who also helped introduce the war powers measure, said some of his colleagues have conflated the issue with assessments of whether Maduro − whose oversaw human rights abuses and economic collapse in Venezuela − was a good or bad leader. Instead, in his view, the debate among lawmakers should be about who has the power to take U.S. troops to war. America’s founders, he said, clearly left that power with Congress.
“The reason they didn’t want to have the president to have so much power is because they wanted less war,” he said. “They wanted war to be a consensus.”
Other Republicans instead praised the administration for taking control of the situation in Venezuela.
“Our goal is to see a peaceful country,” said Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota.
“We’re in charge,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally. “If you try to undercut what we’re trying to do, you’ll pay a price.”
The war powers resolution will go for a vote of final passage in the Senate before heading to the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.
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