In a surprise vote outcome on Thursday, the U.S. Senate narrowly voted to advance a resolution to limit U.S. 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 get to potential congressional passage, the vote sends a political signal to the White House that a critical bipartisan mass of lawmakers may have finally reached their limit on Trump’s recent extraordinary assertions of unilateral executive power to use the military as he pleases—including by initiating an open-ended commitment to run Venezuela following last weekend’s covert operation to capture President Nicolás Maduro, to say nothing of recent threats against Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and NATO ally Denmark.
Kaine’s measure this week picked up three additional Republican votes—Todd Young, Susan Collins, and Josh Hawley—compared with a similar Venezuela-related war powers resolution that narrowly failed a procedural vote last November. Hawley’s support is especially notable considering his prominence within the dominant MAGA wing of the Republican Party and his presumed presidential aspirations.
“To me, this is all about going forward,” Hawley said to reporters on Thursday. “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.”
Further floor votes in the Senate on the war powers resolution are likely to happen next week.
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman—who is somewhat of a wild card within his caucus, especially on foreign-policy matters—left the door open to changing his vote on the resolution ahead of final passage.
“I believe the arrest of Maduro was a positive development for Venezuela and its people,” Fetterman said in a statement. “I voted AYE on this resolution to discharge it from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee so we can continue this important debate on the floor of the Senate.”
If the resolution passes the Senate, it has a narrow path to passage in the House, assuming all Democrats vote in favor of it.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson currently has a perilously 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.
Still, the White House has promised to veto the resolution should it reach the president’s desk, and that veto would likely stick.
Following the vote, Trump castigated the five Senate Republicans who voted to advance the resolution and said they should “never be elected to office again.”
“This Vote greatly hampers American Self Defense and National Security, impeding 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 repeatedly used that law over the decades to force congressional oversight onto an uncooperative executive branch that at times has initiated but not disclosed foreign military operations, including during the Reagan administration in places such as El Salvador and Honduras.
“Members of Congress has just lost the muscle memory about how to do war powers oversight,” John Bellinger, who was the State Department’s top legal advisor during the George W. Bush administration, said ahead of the Thursday vote. “They forgot the way Congress throughout the ’70s and ’80s and even the early ’90s exercised vigorous oversight over presidential warmaking. What’s really happened now is that the Republicans in Congress have just become enslaved to Donald Trump.”
Trump and his allies inside and outside the administration in the days and weeks ahead are expected to increase pressure on congressional Republicans to vote against Democratic-led efforts to curb his scope for military operations in the Western Hemisphere.
Even so, it is noteworthy that this initial bipartisan war powers rebuke—the first of Trump’s second administration—came at the high-water mark of Republican optimism and enthusiasm over the capture of Maduro, a feat that was managed without any U.S. fatalities.
But should events in Venezuela start to spiral outside of U.S. control—if, for example, violence breaks out between competing power factions within the South American country—it’s likely that Republican opposition to giving Trump a blank check for his military adventurism will grow.