President Donald Trump’s furious public pressure campaign succeeded Wednesday night in flipping the votes of two Republican senators who last week supported blocking further attacks on Venezuela.
A bipartisan war powers resolution was defeated in the full senate after Vice President JD Vance cast a tie-breaking vote. The bill was defeated during parliamentary maneuvering before a full up-or-down vote.
Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Todd Young, R-Ind., had voted to advance the resolution last week but voted against it this week following intense lobbying from the White House.
“The real threat of congressional pushback now hangs over the administration.”
Still, critics of the war on Venezuela said they were counting the debate as a partial victory, having forced Congress to confront an issue that GOP leaders would rather avoid.
“The extraordinary lengths the administration went to in order to kill this vote show that it takes congressional war powers authority seriously when Congress actually asserts it,” said Cavan Kharrazian, a senior advisor at the left-leaning group Demand Progress. “The real threat of congressional pushback now hangs over the administration as it decides how to proceed militarily in Venezuela and elsewhere.”
Procedural Chicanery
Last week, the Senate voted to advance to a full-fledged debate on the resolution cosponsored by Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Rand Paul, R-Ky.
The resolution “directs the President to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities within or against Venezuela, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force.”
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Four other Republicans joined Paul in voting for last week’s resolution.
Still, it was only a procedural vote setting up a full debate. Trump immediately lashed out at the five GOP senators who voted for it, declaring that they should never be elected to office again. He repeated his attacks Tuesday, calling Paul a “stone cold loser.”
Kaine and Paul’s resolution was set for a full debate Wednesday. Instead, Republican leaders killed the bill through a bit of parliamentary maneuvering. Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, argued a point of order that the resolution was not privileged — a special status that allows it to pass with a simple majority vote — because hostilities against Venezuela were not ongoing.
“Even this institution cannot stop something that isn’t happening,” Risch said.
Before the vote, Hawley had already said he would vote with GOP leaders, citing a personal assurance from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as national security adviser.
“The secretary told me directly that the administration will not put ground troops in Venezuela,” Hawley said, according to CBS News.
Young kept his intentions a mystery right up until the vote.
Paul and Kaine ridiculed the argument that hostilities have come to an end. There is still an American flotilla in the Caribbean, and Trump is still threatening Venezuela’s leaders with further attacks, they said.
Risch had sought to bolster the case for his procedural motion by asking the White House to confirm that the U.S. operation against Venezuela was over and hostilities had come to an end.
He received a response from Rubio that dodged those questions. Instead, Rubio said only that there were no U.S. troops in Venezuela at present and that “new operations” would be undertaken “consistent with the U.S. Constitution.”
“A softball set of two questions to the secretary of state to justify their position produced a response where he would not agree that the operation is over,” Kaine said, “and he would not agree that the U.S. is now not in hostilities in or against Venezuela.”
Public Pressure
Trump’s angry denunciations of the Republicans who voted for the measure last week may have had more effect than the White House’s legal justifications for the attack.
“Congress’s war powers aren’t supposed to rest on trust, they rest on law.”
Kharrazian, of Demand Progress, said the White House had gone to “extraordinary lengths” to pressure the GOP senators.
“That looks less like being persuaded by good-faith legal argument and more like an effort to bully Congress into abdicating its role based on political threats and promises it shouldn’t simply trust,” he said. “Congress’s war powers aren’t supposed to rest on trust, they rest on law.”
Trump’s strong-arm pressure campaign was all the more remarkable because even supporters of the measure acknowledged that it had little chance of passing into law. It’s fate in the House was uncertain and it was far from reaching a veto-proof majority.
The post Trump Bullies Flip-Flopping Senators Into Defeating Vote to Block Venezuela War appeared first on The Intercept.
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