President Donald Trump suffered a rare setback Thursday after the Republican-led Senate narrowly advanced a bipartisan measure to restrict further military operations against Venezuela without congressional approval.
The Senate voted 52-47 on a procedural step for the war powers resolution, with five Republicans joining Democrats to support the measure, marking a significant rebuke of Trump’s actions in Venezuela after a military operation that deposed former dictator Nicolas Maduro. Republicans were broadly supportive of the operation, but the vote reflects growing unease over the lack of congressional notification and how the administration plans to manage the transition.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a co-author of the resolution, along with Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Susan Collins (R-ME), Todd Young (R-IN), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) were the Republicans who crossed the aisle to support the measure.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) was the lone undecided Democrat going into the vote, but he ultimately stuck with his party on Thursday.
The outcome is a shift from two unsuccessful war power votes in the Senate, spurred last year by the Pentagon’s campaign against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Thursday’s vote was on whether to bring the resolution to the Senate floor, meaning it has yet to pass the Senate but likely has the necessary support.
House lawmakers are mounting their own bipartisan effort to pass a war powers resolution, but the efforts have been largely symbolic given Trump’s ability to veto. The GOP House narrowly rejected a similar vote in December, keeping all but three Republicans in line with the rest of the party.
Collins, a centrist up for reelection in battleground Maine, said that Trump’s openness to a drawn-out U.S. presence in Venezuela justifies the need for Congress to reaffirm its authority.
“I believe invoking the War Powers Act at this moment is necessary, given the president’s comments about the possibility of ‘boots on the ground’ and a sustained engagement ‘running’ Venezuela, with which I do not agree,” Collins said in a statement.
Top administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and War Secretary Pete Hegseth, insisted to lawmakers during all-member classified briefings on the eve of the vote that the president’s actions have been warranted and properly executed under his constitutional authority.
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The administration is in the midst of selling off up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil that the U.S. will use to leverage the country’s transition of government.
“They are not generating any revenue from their oil right now. They can’t move it, unless we allow it to move because we have sanctions, because we’re enforcing those sanctions. This is tremendous leverage. We are exercising it in a positive way,” Rubio told reporters Wednesday. “They understand that the only way they can move oil and generate revenue and not have economic collapse is if they cooperate and work with the United States.”