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The US Senate on Thursday blocked a Democratic war powers resolution that would have forced Donald Trump to seek congressional approval to launch strikes in Venezuela, allowing the president to remain unchecked in his ability to expand his military campaign against the country.
The 49-51 vote against passing the resolution, mostly along party lines, came a month after a previous effort to stop strikes against alleged drug trafficking boats in international waters similarly failed, 48-51.
The new resolution narrowed its scope to attract Republicans, but senators Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski remained the only two Republicans to cross party lines to support the resolution. Susan Collins and Thom Tillis, who had expressed reservations about the strikes, voted against.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has ramped up its military campaign against drug cartels – and to destabilize the Venezuelan government – deploying the United States’s most advanced aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, just days after Trump announced the US would next hit land-based targets.
“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” Trump told reporters at the White House on 23 October. “We’re going to kill them, you know. They’re going to be, like, dead.”
The administration has also developed a range of options for military action in Venezuela, according to two people familiar with the matter, and Trump’s aides have asked the justice department for additional guidance that could provide a legal basis to strike targets other than boats.
Trump has yet to make a decision, in part because the office of legal counsel at the justice department has not yet issued an updated memo. Trump is also uncertain about the most aggressive plan to try and oust Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The war powers resolution had virtually no chance of being enacted, given it would need to be signed by Trump himself, but the vote on the resolution gave an opportunity for senators to go on the record with their concerns about the escalating US military entanglements in the region.
“If the administration intends to escalate towards conflict with Venezuela, Congress has a constitutional duty to declare and authorize such action,” Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, said before the vote. “We cannot sleepwalk into another war.”
‘“If this operation makes strategic sense, let the administration make that case to Congress and the American people,” Reed added. “What happens when we win? What does winning mean? What are the limits of this operation?”
The continued strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats and the prospect of strikes on land in Venezuela has led to growing frustration among lawmakers, including Republicans on key committees who have sought more detailed legal justifications.
At a classified briefing on Wednesday by defense secretary Pete Hegseth and secretary of state Marco Rubio, top congressional leaders were told the administration was continuing to rely on an office of legal counsel memo that listed dozens of drug cartel groups as legitimate targets for lethal strikes.
The administration also sent T Elliot Gaiser, the head of the justice department’s office of legal counsel, according to people familiar with the matter. Gaiser previously told lawmakers the strikes do not rise to the level of “hostilities” covered by the 1973 law called the War Powers Resolution, which limits the president’s ability to conduct unilateral military operations.
Trump announced what appears to have been the first strike on 2 September, releasing a brief video of the attack. In the weeks that followed, the administration announced more strikes without disclosing details other than the number of people killed and the claim that the boats carried drugs.
Since the start of the military campaign, the administration has provided a dubious legal justification for the strikes, claiming the boats are affiliated with “designated terrorist organisations”, or DTOs, with which the US was now in a “non-international armed conflict”, the Guardian has reported.
The administration has nevertheless provided no concrete evidence to date that those killed in the boat strikes were smuggling drugs to the US. In briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials in essence said the boats were legitimate targets because Trump had designated them as assets of cartels seen to be DTOs, people familiar with the matter said.
The military campaign has also drawn in the Central Intelligence Agency. Trump confirmed on 15 October that he had authorized so-called “covert action” by the CIA in Venezuela. The Guardian has reported that the CIA has been providing a bulk of the intelligence used in the airstrikes.
