The US Senate on Thursday advanced a resolution aimed at curbing President Donald Trump’s military actions in Venezuela, a rare bipartisan challenge following alarm over the secretive capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
The Democratic-led measure, which would bar further US hostilities against Venezuela without explicit congressional authorization, cleared a key procedural vote with support from five Republicans, reported the AFP news agency.
A final vote is expected next week and is widely viewed as a formality. If passed, it would mark one of Congress’s strongest assertions of its war‑making authority in decades. Still, the effort is seen as largely symbolic, facing steep odds in the House and almost no chance of surviving a likely veto from Trump.
The President blasted the five Republican senators who backed the measure, calling their “stupidity » out on Truth Social and saying they “should never be elected to office again. »
“Republicans should be ashamed of the Senators that just voted with Democrats in attempting to take away our Powers to fight and defend the United States of America, » he added.
The vote came after US air and naval strikes and the nighttime seizure of Maduro in Caracas, which lawmakers from both parties said went far beyond a limited law‑enforcement mission and crossed into war.
In an interview published Thursday, Trump said the United States could run Venezuela and tap into its oil reserves for years, telling The New York Times that “only time will tell » how long Washington would demand direct oversight of the country.
Democrats have cast the resolution as a constitutional boundary after what they described as months of misleading briefings, including assurances as recently as November that the administration had no plans for strikes on Venezuelan soil.
The administration has defended the Maduro operation as legally justified under a broader campaign against transnational drug trafficking, describing it as a fight against cartels designated as terrorist organizations.
Over the past century, only one congressional measure has successfully imposed a broad, lasting limit on unilateral presidential military action abroad: the War Powers Resolution of 1973, passed over then‑president Richard Nixon’s veto.
