The Senate on Thursday advanced a bipartisan measure intended to block the Trump administration from conducting further military action in Venezuela, foreshadowing a rare assertion of Congress’s role in using lethal force after the stunning raid to apprehend the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
The Senate voted 52-47, with five Republicans joining all Democrats. The timing for a final vote was not immediately clear.
The measure would mark the first time during the second Trump administration that Congress has voted to constrain President Donald Trump’s expansive use of the military to conduct foreign policy. Republicans have mostly cheered the attack to oust Maduro, but the party is increasingly divided over how to respond to Trump’s escalating threats to use force around the world, including against U.S. allies such as Denmark.
“A drawn-out campaign in Venezuela involving the American military, even if unintended, would be the opposite of President Trump’s goal of ending foreign entanglements,” Sen. Todd Young (R-Indiana) said in a statement indicating he would support the measure.
The other Republicans who supported the bill were Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Josh Hawley (Missouri), Susan Collins (Maine) and Rand Paul (Kentucky).
Trump reacted angrily to the vote, attacking the five GOP lawmakers by name in a social media post and saying they “should never be elected to office again.” Thursday’s action, the president said, “hampers American Self Defense and National Security” by threatening to limit his authority.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), an outspoken advocate of Trump’s strategy toward Venezuela, warned on social media that “our enemies will be encouraged by this vote in the U.S. Senate.”
Speaking at a White House news briefing, Vice President JD Vance — who has previously opposed open-ended U.S. military commitments abroad — said he was “not concerned at all” by Thursday’s vote and that the War Powers Act is “not going to change anything about how we conduct foreign policy.”
Republicans in the House and the Senate previously defeated four war powers resolutions seeking to limit the Trump administration’s use of deadly force in Venezuela or in the waters off Latin America, where the U.S. military has killed more than 100 people by striking alleged drug-trafficking boats.
Trump has said that no further attacks on Venezuela are imminent but that they may become necessary if the country’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, does not acquiesce to U.S. demands for access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. Trump has declined to rule out putting U.S. troops on the ground inside the country “as it pertains to oil,” and he has threatened action against Mexico, Cuba and Colombia in the aftermath of Saturday’s raid.
Thursday’s vote revealed a red line even for some Senate Republicans who had previously doubted the likelihood that Trump would order a unilateral attack on Venezuela. GOP senators voted down a similar measure in November shortly after Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who doubles as Trump’s national security adviser, told key lawmakers in a classified briefing that the administration did not intend to invade the country and that doing so would carry risks.
“I think the vote today reflects that more Republicans are taking it seriously because it’s no longer a hypothetical but a real war,” Paul, the Kentucky Republican, told reporters.
Ahead of the vote, Democrats had accused the administration of blatantly misleading Congress and said their Republican colleagues were abandoning lawmakers’ authority to check U.S. use of lethal military force.
Rubio, who returned to Capitol Hill this week to brief the House and Senate on Saturday’s raid, has rejected Democrats’ assertions that he lied to Congress. He has sought to characterize Saturday’s raid as a “law enforcement” operation, with the military merely helping enforce a Justice Department warrant to detain Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, whom the United States has indicted on drugs and weapons charges.
Paul introduced the resolution with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) and Adam Schiff (D-California). Schumer told reporters after the vote that the “pressure is now on Senate Republicans to do the right thing and take a stand.”
Hawley, the Missouri Republican who voted for the measure, said he believed Trump had the constitutional authority to strike boats in the Caribbean and possibly to capture Maduro without congressional authorization — but not to potentially deploy troops to Venezuela.
“To me, this is all about going forward,” Hawley told reporters. “If the president should determine, ‘You know what, I need to put troops on the ground in Venezuela,’ I think that would require Congress to weigh in.”
Four of the Senate Republicans whom Trump said should not be reelected are not up for reelection this year, but the fifth, Maine’s Collins, is a top Democratic target in November.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) downplayed Trump’s outburst after the vote. “I think in the end he, like all of us, want to make sure that we have Republican majority in the Senate,” Thune told reporters. “And we all know that, in the state of Maine, the way to make that happen” is to reelect Collins.
Thursday’s outcome was an unusual victory for Democrats, who have struggled to develop a strategy for how to respond to Saturday’s raid. Sen. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) had wavered on the measure before ultimately joining fellow Democrats in voting yes. In a statement afterward, he did not commit to supporting its final passage.
Still, many in the party believe Saturday’s attack was illegal and have sharply criticized Trump’s subsequent promise that his administration would “run” Venezuela for the foreseeable future.
Some Democrats are preparing additional war powers resolutions that would seek to block military action against other potential targets — including Cuba and Greenland — while others want a more aggressive approach, using Congress’s annual spending bills to limit funding for any future military deployments to Venezuela.
Brianna Tucker contributed to this report.
correctionA previous version of this article stated incorrectly that a war powers resolution had received final passage in the Senate. Thursday’s vote advanced the measure toward final passage. The timing for a final vote was not immediately clear.
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