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The latest bipartisan campaign to rein in President Donald Trump’s war authority in Venezuela may have failed, but the lawmaker behind the push has no intention of stopping his pursuit.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., plans to continue his goal of corralling Trump’s policing power across the globe, and believes that he can find support among Republicans to pass a war powers resolution out of the Senate.
“The other thing we’re going to do is this: We’re going to be filing a whole lot more war powers resolutions,” Kaine said after the unsuccessful vote to advance his resolution.
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He argued that this resolution, though unable to make it out of the Senate this time, was similar to a war powers resolution he filed shortly after the strike ordered by Trump in 2020 that killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani.
The resolution garnered eight Republican votes in a GOP-controlled Senate at the time.
“When you do it, and you get Republican votes, it sends a message to the White House,” he said.
Kaine and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who co-sponsored the latest war powers resolution, previously suggested that later attempts to rein in Trump’s war authorities could be focused on Greenland, Iran and Cuba.
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Kaine’s optimism comes from the successful vote to curtail Trump’s war powers in Venezuela earlier this month, where five Senate Republicans splintered from their colleagues to advance a resolution that would have required the president to confer with Congress before future military action in the region.
Still, that same cohort was unable to survive a pressure campaign from Senate Republican leadership, Trump and administration officials.
The two lawmakers who reversed their position, Sens. Todd Young, R-Ind., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., did so because of guarantees from the administration, chiefly Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that no boots would be on the ground in Venezuela.
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Young received the assurance from Rubio in a letter the day of the vote, when he said that should Trump “determine that he intends to introduce U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities in major military operations in Venezuela, he would seek congressional authorization in advance (circumstances permitting).”
Kaine said that while the outcome was disappointing, and Trump and Senate Republican leadership engaged in a “full-court press unlike any I’ve seen in 13 years here” to stop the resolution from succeeding, the cracks in the foundation were still there. And Kaine believed they were ripe to fracture even further.
“The way cracks grow is through pressure and the pressure campaign that I sort of decided to launch by use of these privileged motions. I’m going to file every one I can to challenge emergencies, to challenge unlawful wars, to seek human rights reports, arms transfers if they’re wrong,” he said.
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