Trump team works behind the scenes to get Congress to halt restrictions on further Venezuela attacks
The White House is reportedly working overtime to flip Republican senators back to their side, even after Donald Trump publicly trashed them and advised voters to never elect them to office again.
It comes as the administration suffered a rare defeat in the Senate last week when five members of the president’s party broke ranks to support a War Powers resolution aimed at restricting the administration from further strikes against Venezuela submitted by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), advancing it to a final floor vote. The vote triggered an angry response from Trump on Truth Social.
“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. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Josh Hawley, and Todd Young should never be elected to office again,” wrote a furious Trump on Thursday.
Now the White House is reaching out to some or all of those same senators, according to Politico, and working to alleviate the concerns they have about the administration’s plans for the South American country where U.S. forces abducted its president, Nicolas Maduro, in a stunning raid earlier this month. Maduro is now facing drug trafficking charges in New York.
The White House has until Wednesday, when Kaine says a “vote-a-rama” session for the resolution will be held in the Senate and the chamber will debate final passage. Assuming that all Democratic senators remain supportive of the resolution, the president’s team would need to flip two Republican votes to defeat the resolution on the final vote.
One of those senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, told Politico that her vote wasn’t changing. That leaves four others whom the president could conceivably flip. One, Todd Young, declined to comment to the news outlet about whether his stance would change on final passage.
If the White House is successful, it could be yet another case of the chamber’s Republicans mounting resistance to the White House, but only just shy of enough to actually threaten the president’s efforts.
Even if the resolution passes, it likely will not matter. The House of Representatives may not even take it up, and if it reaches Trump’s desk he could still veto it. Overriding Trump’s veto would require the votes of two-thirds of the Senate.
Still, its advancement last week and potential final passage serve as symbolic rebukes of the vision that the administration has laid out for Venezuela and, more broadly, its military posture in the western hemisphere. The votes come as senators are concurrently discussing Trump’s threats to use military force to seize Greenland from Denmark, while also threatening other potential interventions in Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and even Iran.
In Venezuela, in particular, the White House now faces questions about the country’s future. The president and his team haven’t said for certain how they believe the transition from Maduro’s presidency should take place, or endorsed a specific figure in Venezuela to take over the reins of government.
U.S. officials accused Maduro of running a vast criminal cartel known as “Cartel de los Soles” which also allegedly involved other top government officials and members of the military and intelligence services.
Trump, on many occasions, has said that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela for the time being, and repeatedly refused to rule out prospect of deploying American troops to the country. According to Politico, reassurances that the latter prospect is unlikely were part of the White House’s arguments to get Hawley, one of the five Republican defectors, back on board.
Hours before the president’s angry statement on Truth Social, Hawley contended in a press gaggle that his vote wasn’t meant as a snub of the president. According to news reports, some of the wayward Republican members were subject to sometimes irate calls from the president in the days leading up to last week’s vote.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Hawley on a phone call that the administration had “no plans” to deploy troops and if that changed would potentially seek congressional authorization first: “Marco said to me — he said, ‘we … have no ground troops. We have no plans to put ground troops in,’” the Missouri senator told Politico.
