The Senate on Thursday passed a bipartisan measure intended to block the Trump administration from conducting further military action in Venezuela, a rare assertion of Congress’s role in using lethal force after the stunning raid to apprehend the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
The largely symbolic resolution passed by a vote of 52 to 47. Five Republicans joined all Democrats in supporting it.
The measure marked the first time during the second Trump administration that Congress has voted to constrain the president’s expansive use of the military to conduct foreign policy. Republicans have mostly cheered the attack to oust Maduro, but some have since signaled that a sustained military presence in Venezuela would require their approval — a rebuke of the president’s threat of an open-ended military commitment.
“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), who supported the measure, said in a statement.
Republicans in the House and 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.
President Donald Trump has said further attacks on Venezuela are not imminent but 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 also has declined to rule out putting U.S. troops on the ground inside the country “as it pertains to oil.”
Thursday’s vote marked a red line even for some Senate Republicans who had previously doubted the likelihood Trump would order a unilateral attack on Venezuela. GOP senators voted down a similar measure in November shortly after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told key lawmakers in a classified briefing that the administration did not intend to invadethe country and that doing so would carry risks.
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 said that the attack was 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.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) introduced the resolution with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) and Adam Schiff (D-California).
The result is an unusual victory for Democrats, who have struggled to develop a strategy for how to respond to Saturday’s raid. Many in the party believe the 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 more 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.
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