US Senate to vote on bid to stop Trump from taking further military action in Venezuela

The US Senate is expected to vote on Thursday on a long-shot attempt to prevent Donald Trump from taking further military actions against Venezuela, as Democrats press for answers following the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro.

The war powers resolution, introduced by Democratic senator Tim Kaine, would require Trump to seek Congress’s permission before attacking or otherwise using the military against Venezuela. The president did not notify lawmakers before the Saturday raid that saw US special forces assault the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and spirit Maduro to New York City, where he is facing an array of “narco-terrorism” charges.

“After the administration’s actions over the weekend, which resulted in several injuries to US service members … Congress needs to tell the American public where it stands,” Kaine said in a Tuesday speech on the Senate floor.

Concern over US involvement in Venezuela is “about an instinctive wisdom among the American people that says war should be a last resort and it shouldn’t be entered into upon the say so of one person”, he added

The resolution is the latest to be proposed by Congress’s Democratic minority to halt Trump’s campaign against Venezuela’s government, which intensified in September when Trump approved airstrikes on boats off its coast that he alleges carried drugs.

Those attacks have killed at least 110 people, though experts have disputed Trump’s claim that the vessels were carrying fentanyl to US shores. Controversy intensified after it emerged that the military opted to kill two survivors of a strike rather than take them captive.

Previous war powers resolutions proposed in both chambers have failed – albeit narrowly – to garner enough support from the Republican majority to advance. Many in the GOP have praised Trump’s strikes on Venezuela as well as the rendition of Maduro as effective uses of US power.

“The world is safer because Maduro is apprehended in the hands of the US justice system,” the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said on Wednesday after the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, briefed members of both chambers.

“President Trump is a strong president who takes decisive action, and that sends an important message to other dangerous people, terrorists and tyrants around the world. I think that’s an important role for America to play.”

In the Senate, Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski have been the only Republicans to break with their party and support the earlier war powers resolutions. In comments to reporters on Wednesday, Paul argued that Congress must assert its authority over making war even when a military operation is successful, or risk allowing the country to be “run by emergency”.

“The reason you argue on principle against even things that appear to be good … isn’t even always for the current president, it’s for the next president,” he said.

Democrats may suffer defections of their own in the Senate. John Fetterman, who represents swing state Pennsylvania, praised the Saturday attack as “positive for Venezuela”.

“As a Democrat, I don’t understand why we can’t acknowledge a good development for Venezuelans – and how deft our military’s execution of that plan was,” he wrote on X.

Democrats seem inclined to press the issue, no matter how Thursday’s vote turns out. Kaine said he expected lawmakers to introduce other war powers resolutions intended to stop hostilities towards Nigeria, Cuba, Mexico and Colombia – all countries Trump has struck in the past year, or threatened to attack.

Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House foreign affairs committee, criticized Rubio and Hegseth after the briefing for not fully answering lawmakers’ questions. Last month, a war powers resolution he proposed was rejected by the House, and Meeks said he was considering introducing another.

“I have not seen the justification. We went from drugs to regime change to oil,” Meeks said. “I think that we need to get another war powers plan and get a vote on the floor, because this should upset not only Democrats, but Republicans also.”