President Trump appeared angry after the Senate voted last Thursday to move a war powers resolution to the next stage, where lawmakers could approve the measure and seek curb the president's ability to wage war in Venezuela without authorization from Congress.
Triumph saying that day that five Republican senators who supported bringing the measure to a vote – Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rand Paul (Ky.), Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Todd Young (Ind.) – “should never again be elected to office.”
Why should he get so riled up about this, to the point that it could jeopardize his own party's control of the Senate in November? Even if this resolution were to pass both houses of Congress, it could be vetoed and ultimately left unrestricted. It did so in 2019, when both the Senate and House passed a war powers resolution ordering the U.S. military to cease its involvement in the war in Yemen. Many people think that legislation of this type cannot therefore make a difference.
But the president's anger is telling. These political measures in Congress can produce results even before the resolution has a final vote or if it is vetoed by the president.
The Trump administration made significant concessions before Congress passed the 2019 resolution, in an attempt to prevent its passage. For example, months before its approval, the US military disrupted refueling Saudi fighter jets in the air. These concessions de-escalated the war and saved tens of thousands of lives.
A war powers resolution is an act of Congress that is based on a 1973 law of the same name. That law details and reinforces the power our Constitution has assigned to Congress to decide when the U.S. military may participate in hostilities.
The US military raid in Caracas that detained Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, is illegal under international law, according to the cards of the Organization of American States and the United Nationsas well as other treaties to which the United States is a signatory. According to our own Constitution, the government viola American law when it violates treaties that our government has signed.
None of that stopped the Trump administration, which has not shown much respect for the rule of law. But the White House does care about the political power of Congress. If there is an expanded war in Venezuela or anywhere else Trump has threatened to use the military, the fact that Congress has taken action to oppose it will increase the political cost to the president.
This is probably one of the main reasons why the Trump administration has at least promised to make concessions regarding military action in Latin America and, who knows, possibly made some concessions compared to what had been planned.
On November 5, one day before the Senate voted on a war powers resolution to stop and prevent Hostilities in or against Venezuela by the US military, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House counsel had a private briefing with senators.
They assured lawmakers that they were not going to have a ground war or air strikes in Venezuela. According to news reports, White House counsel fixed that they had no legal justification for such a war. It is clear that blocking the resolution was very important to these senior officials. The day after that meeting, the war powers resolution was blocked by two votes. Two Republicans had joined Democrats and independents in supporting the resolution: Murkowski and Paul. That amounted to 49 votes, not the necessary majority.
But on Thursday, there were three more Republicans who voted in favor of the new resolution, so it will proceed to a final vote.
Resolving war powers is not just a political struggle, but a matter of life and death. The blockade that implies the seizure of oil tankers is, according According to experts, an illegal use of military force. This means that the blockade would be included as participation in hostilities that would require congressional authorization.
Since 2015, the United States has imposed unilateral economic sanctions that destroyed Venezuela's economy. From 2012 to 2020, Venezuela suffered the worst peacetime depression in world history. GDP or real income (adjusted for inflation) fell by 74%. Think about the economic destruction of the Great Depression in the United States, multiplied by three. Most of this was a result of sanctions.
This unprecedented devastation is generally attributed to Maduro in public debate. But US sanctions deliberately isolated Venezuela from international financing, in addition to blocking most of its oil sales, which accounted for more than 90% of its foreign currency earnings (mainly dollars). This devastated the economy.
In the first year of Trump's sanctions from 2017 to 2018, deaths in Venezuela increased by tens of thousands of people, at a time when oil prices were rising. The sanctions were further expanded the following year. Approximately a quarter of the population, more than 7 million people, emigrated after 2015 – 750,000 of them to the United States.
We know that the deadly impact of sanctions targeting civilians is real. Research published in July by The Lancet Global Health, conducted by my colleagues Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón and me, estimated the number of global deaths from unilateral economic sanctions, as they are, at least 564,000 per year during the last decade. This is comparable to global deaths from armed conflict. TO most of the victims during the period 1970-2021 were children.
In recent days, the Trump administration has been moving in the direction of lifting some sanctions to allow oil exports. according to the president's declared plan to “govern Venezuela.” This is ironic because Venezuela has for many years wanted more investment and trade, including in oil, with the United States, and it was US sanctions that prohibited it.
Such lifting of sanctions would be a huge step forward in terms of saving the lives of people deprived of food, medicine and other necessities in Venezuela, as a result of these sanctions and the economic destruction they cause.
But to create the stability Venezuela needs to recover, we will have to eliminate military and economic violence from this campaign. There are members of Congress moving toward that goal and they need all the help they can get before it's too late.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of Center for economic and political research and author of “Failed: What the 'experts' got wrong about the global economy.”
