Bipartisan Senate Vote Seeks to Curb Trump’s Unauthorized Military Force in Venezuela

In a surprise vote on Thursday, the US Senate narrowly voted to advance a resolution to prevent US President Donald Trump from taking any further unauthorized military action in or against Venezuela.

The 52-47 procedural vote on Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine’s war powers resolution was supported by all Democrats and five Republicans.

In a surprise vote on Thursday, the US Senate narrowly voted to advance a resolution to prevent US President Donald Trump from taking any further unauthorized military action in or against Venezuela.

The 52-47 procedural vote on Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine’s war powers resolution was supported by all Democrats and five Republicans.

While there is still a long way to go to reach potential passage in congress, the vote sends a political signal to the White House that a critical mass of bipartisan lawmakers may have finally reached the limit of Trump’s recent extraordinary assertions of unilateral executive authority to use the military as he pleases — including by initiating an open-ended commitment to running Venezuela after last weekend’s secret operation to capture President Nicolas Maduro, not to mention recent threats against Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and the NATO ally. Denmark.

The measure Kaine introduced this week received three additional votes from Republicans — Todd Young, Susan Collins and Josh Hawley — compared to a similar war powers resolution in Venezuela that narrowly failed in a procedural vote last November. Hawley’s support is particularly notable given his reputation within the dominant MAGA wing of the Republican Party and his supposed presidential aspirations.

“For me, it’s all about moving forward,” Hawley told reporters Thursday. “If the president were to decide, ‘You know I need to put boots on the ground in Venezuela,’ I think that would require Congress to intervene.”

More Senate votes on the War Powers Resolution are likely to take place next week.

Democratic Senator John Fetterman – somewhat of an unpredictable figure within his caucus, especially on foreign policy matters – has left the door open to changing his vote on the resolution before its final passage.

“I believe Maduro’s arrest was a positive development for Venezuela and its people,” Fetterman said in a statement. “I voted for this resolution to move it out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee so we can continue this important discussion on the Senate floor.”

If the resolution passes the Senate, it will have a narrow path to pass in the House of Representatives, assuming that all Democrats vote in favor of it.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson currently has a razor-thin majority of just two votes, and several Republicans, including Reps. Thomas Massie and Don Bacon, have already spoken in favor of limiting Trump’s unauthorized military operations in Venezuela.

However, the White House has promised to veto the resolution if it reaches the president’s desk, and that veto is likely to stick.

After the vote, Trump criticized the five Republican senators who voted for the resolution, saying they “should never be elected to office again.”

“This vote significantly impedes America’s self-defense and national security, and hampers the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief,” the president said in a post on Truth Social. He also asserted that the War Powers Act, which became law in 1973 after overcoming a veto by then-President Richard Nixon, was unconstitutional.

Lawmakers have used the law repeatedly over decades to impose congressional oversight on an uncooperative executive branch that sometimes initiated but did not disclose foreign military operations, including during the Reagan administration in places like El Salvador and Honduras.

“Members of Congress have lost muscle memory as to how to monitor war powers,” John Bellinger, who was the State Department’s chief legal adviser during the George W. Bush administration, said ahead of Thursday’s vote. “They have forgotten the way Congress throughout the 1970s and 1980s and into the early 1990s exercised strong oversight of presidential warmaking. What has actually happened now is that Republicans in Congress have just become enslaved to Donald Trump.”

In the coming days and weeks, Trump and his allies inside and outside the administration are expected to increase pressure on Republicans in Congress to vote against Democratic-led efforts to limit the scope of military operations in the Western Hemisphere.

However, it is worth noting that this initial rebuke of the bipartisan war powers—the first Trump administration the second—came at the highest level of Republican optimism and enthusiasm about capturing Maduro, a feat achieved without any American deaths.

But if events in Venezuela begin to spiral out of U.S. control — for example, if violence erupts between rival power factions within the South American country — Republican opposition to giving Trump a blank check for his military adventures is likely to grow.