Senate readies war powers vote to oppose Trump’s Venezuela threats

Republican senators on Thursday voted down a bipartisan measure that sought to block President Donald Trump from attacking Venezuelan territory, the GOP’s latest show of deference to his expansive use of military force in Latin America.

The resolution failed 51-49, with only two Republicans — Sen. Rand Paul (Kentucky) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — supporting it.

Ahead of the vote, the administration made a concerted push to reassure potential GOP defectors, walking back Trump’s repeated threats of escalation and sharing with them more details about its aggressive activities to disrupt the Latin American drug trade. Crucially, it appears, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday provided a classified briefing for select members of Congress where they indicated that the administration is not currently preparing to target Venezuela directly and didn’t have a proper legal argument for doing so, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Since early September, Trump’s campaign of violence in the waters around Venezuela and Colombia has drawn fierce resistance from Democrats and legal experts. The killing to date of more than 65 people, they argue, violates the laws of war because the small boats being targeted are carrying civilians allegedly involved in the commercial sale of drugs, not armed attacks on U.S. citizens.

The Pentagon has flooded the region with warships, attack helicopters and high-end fighter jets, and Trump has said repeatedly in recent weeks that the operation against alleged drug smugglers would soon expand to encompass targets on land. Then, in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, the president said “I doubt it; I don’t think so,” when asked if he intends to start a war in Venezuela.

Democrats who pushed for Thursday’s vote said they were skeptical of the administration’s attempts to dial back Trump’s previous comments.

“If the administration truly believed that hostilities were not imminent, as it claims, then why all the firepower in the Caribbean?” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California), one of the resolution’s sponsors, told reporters Thursday.

The measure called on the administration to refrain from conducting any military operations against Venezuela without approval from Congress, which has the sole authority under the Constitution to declare war.

“The executive branch does not have the authority to kill at will anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason,” Paul, the Kentucky Republican who also sponsored the bill, said in a speech ahead of the vote.

Paul joined another effort in October that sought to block the administration from attacking alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea, though that vote failed 51-48 after attracting the support of only one other Republican: Murkowski. Since then, the administration has expanded the campaign, attacking vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean suspected of hauling narcotics from Colombia or Ecuador.

Other GOP senators had said they were more open to supporting a narrower resolution, such as the one that failed Thursday. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Todd Young (R-Indiana) have in the past both supported efforts to restrict military force without the approval of lawmakers. They voted against the October bill, arguing it would have risked the administration’s ability to target terrorist groups in other parts of the world, including the Houthis in Yemen.

The new measure sought to allay such concerns by stating that nothing in the bill should be “construed to prevent the United States from defending itself from an armed attack or threat of an imminent armed attack.”

Young, in a statement issued after his no vote, defended his decision by arguing that the resolution was not “necessary or appropriate at this time,” but he also warned of a “creeping expansion of executive war-making” undermining Congress’ authority.

“I am troubled,” his statement says, “by many aspects and assumptions of this operation and believe it is at odds with the majority of Americans who want the U.S. military less entangled in international conflicts.”

Another of the Republicans who was on the fence ahead of Thursday’s vote — Sen. Mike Rounds (South Dakota) — told reporters afterward that he was unsure whether the law in question could apply to a country with which the U.S. was not currently at war.

“There is no war in Venezuela,” Rounds said. He declined to say whether he would seek to block hostilities against Caracas were Trump to start a war there.

Upon his return to the presidency, Trump declared an assortment of Latin American drug cartels and other groups to be “foreign terrorist organizations.” His administration has since provided Capitol Hill with a list of cartel groups it considers to be in an “armed conflict” with the United States.

Trump has been particularly fixated on Venezuela and its leader, Nicolás Maduro, accusing him of sending violent criminals and drugs to the U.S. — and fueling speculation that he intends to forcibly remove Maduro from power. Trump has said publicly that Maduro’s days as president are “numbered.”

In the past week, as more Republicans registered their discontent, the administration took steps to share more information with Congress, though it has resisted calls to speak with the full Senate. After Wednesday’s briefing from Rubio and Hegseth, some high-ranking Democrats — while continuing to vocalize their objections — appeared to take a gentler tone and urged the administration to share the information they received more widely.

Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (New York), the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s top Democrat, said he and others remained unconvinced by the administration’s legal arguments to support the ongoing maritime strikes. Other Democrats who attended the briefing also cast doubt on Trump’s claims to be protecting America from the spread of fentanyl, noting that the boats targeted are mostly carrying cocaine.

In private, the White House has told Congress that its campaign in Latin America is not bound by the War Powers Resolution, a Vietnam War-era law that seeks to restrict the use of military force without lawmakers’ approval. Under that law, the Trump administration would have needed to cease its strikes after 60 days, a deadline that came and went Monday.