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

The Senate will vote Thursday on a bipartisan measure to block President Donald Trump from attacking Venezuelan territory in a new test of Republicans’ willingness to oppose his use of military force in Latin America.

It is unclear whether the largely symbolic effort will attract enough GOP support to pass, or whether a recent push by the administration to walk back Trump’s repeated threats of escalation has reassured those lawmakers who have suggested they might join the effort. On Wednesday, during a classified briefing for select members of Congress, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not indicate that the administration is preparing to target Venezuela directly or that it had a proper legal argument for doing so, according to people who attended the meeting.

“It’s as described: to stop the flow of drugs,” Rep. Jim Himes, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, told reporters afterward. “There is no apparent plans to expand this beyond what they say that they are doing.”

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.

The measure coming up for a vote on Capitol Hill calls 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 bottom line is that execution without process is not justice, and blowing up foreign ships is a recipe for chaos,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who is helping lead the effort, said in a statement 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 the vote failed 48-51 after only attracting the support of one other Republican: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska). 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 have said they are more open to supporting a narrower resolution, such as the one to be voted on Thursday. The earlier measure, some argued, would have risked the administration’s ability to target terrorist groups in other parts of the world, including the Houthis in Yemen.

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 last week, as more Republicans registered their discontent, the administration has taken steps to share more information with Congress, though still without briefing the full Senate.

After Wednesday’s briefing from Rubio and Hegseth, high-ranking Democrats, while continuing to raise 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.