Following concern over the covert capture of leader Nicolas Maduro, the US Senate made a significant step on Thursday toward enacting a resolution to limit President Donald Trump’s military activities in Venezuela. This was a rare bipartisan criticism.
Five Republicans supported the Democratic-led bill, which passed a crucial procedural vote and prohibits additional US hostilities against Venezuela without express congressional authorization.
The final passage vote, which is scheduled for next week, is now viewed as little more than a formality and would be one of Congress’s strongest declarations of its war-making power in decades.
However, the resolution has a difficult climb in the US House and virtually no chance of surviving a likely veto by Trump, making the effort primarily symbolic.
On his Truth Social platform, the president attacked the five Republican rebels for their “stupidity” and declared that they “should never be elected to office again.”
He went on, “Republicans should be ashamed of the senators who just voted with Democrats in an attempt to take away our powers to fight and defend the United States of America.”
The decision came after a sharp increase in US intervention, which senators from both parties claimed went beyond a limited law-enforcement operation and clearly passed into war. This action included air and naval strikes as well as the nocturnal seizure of Maduro in Caracas.
Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky who broke with most of his party to co-sponsor the bill, said, “Less than courageous members of Congress fall all over themselves to avoid taking responsibility, to avoid the momentous vote of declaring war.”
However, bombing the capital of another country and overthrowing its leader is, without a doubt, an act of war. The president is not granted such authority by any clause in the constitution.
In an interview that was released on Thursday, Trump told The New York Times that the United States could control Venezuela and access its oil reserves for years. He also stated that “only time will tell” how long Washington would insist on direct control of the South American country.
After what they described as months of deceptive briefings, including promises from the administration as recently as November that it had no intentions for strikes on Venezuelan territory, Democrats are presenting the resolution as a constitutional line in the sand.
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