Washington, D.C. — Today, a majority of Senate Republicans voted to block U.S. Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) resolution that would have prevented the administration from using future military force against Venezuela without authorization by Congress. The Senators’ resolution emphasized the importance of Congress asserting its power to declare war and the need to avoid getting the United States embroiled in another war.
Last week, the Senate advanced their resolution, but today it was narrowly blocked.
“At the center of this debate is a question of whether we want to risk our service members’ lives in order to secure the oil resources of another country. I do not believe it is worth doing so. But let those who believe that it is worth the risk, the danger to our service members and their families, let them come to the Senate floor and make that argument. Let us have this debate. Let’s not hide behind some Parliamentary maneuver to even avoid a conversation here. There hasn’t been a single hearing in committee, open hearing on this subject, not a fulsome debate over the use of our military power,” said Senator Schiff.
Background: In December, Senators Kaine, Paul, Schiff, and Schumer filed this War Powers resolution to block military action against Venezuela after President Trump said that military operations targeting Venezuelan land targets would begin “very soon.” Schiff, Kaine, and Paul previously introduced a bipartisan resolution to prevent the use of military force within or against Venezuela, but it fell short by just two votes. Schiff and Kaine also introduced, in September, a similar measure focused on repeated military strikes in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that the Trump administration has carried out without congressional authorization, killing dozens of unknown individuals. A majority of Senate Republicans blocked the resolution in October.
In December, Senate Republicans blocked the Senator’s attempt to pass legislation that would require the Trump administration to publicly release the video of the strikes on shipwrecked survivors following boat strikes in the Caribbean conducted September 2nd.
Watch his full speech HERE. Download remarks HERE.
Read the transcript of his remarks as delivered below:
Mr. President,
This year, our nation will celebrate its 250th birthday. 250 years in which our country has built on the foundation that is our Constitution.
The Framers could not conceive of exactly what the future would bring, but they did anticipate a great deal. In significant part, because they could count on some of the immutable characteristics of human nature, of institutions, of communities — like the attraction of the accumulation of power, and how, unless that gravitational force is counterbalanced — one institution, or one man, can come to dominate the life of a country.
One power in particular concerned our Founders, and that was the power to make war. They had seen and been the victims of a monarch who had used the power of war against them. And so they made the radical decision, so contrary to all of the precedent at the time, not to invest such a vital attribute of state sovereignty in the executive, but to grant the power to declare war to Congress.
In April 1798, a future President James Madison wrote to another future President Thomas Jefferson, underscoring the danger, and the decision. He said, “The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates.” He said, “The Executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it.”
“It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.”
Most prone to it. Words written more than 200 years ago. And so fitting for today, when in but his first year in office the president has used military power in Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, and most significantly, in Venezuela.
After months of escalating military action against boats in the Southern Caribbean, after amassing a massive military armada on the doorstep of a foreign nation, the administration dispatched American service members to invade and arrest the corrupt leader of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.
Military action that we were repeatedly told would never come to pass – by a president who promised to avoid starting new foreign wars, engaging in nation building or conducting regime change operations.
This operation was not about narcotics. Nor was it about democracy. It was about oil.
The military occupation in Venezuela captured the country’s corrupt dictator but has left the corrupt drug-running regime in place, instead of turning over the reins of governance to that country’s legitimately elected leadership of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González.
And now our president has committed to running Venezuela for years, in order to exploit its oil resources.
Today, we have the opportunity to exercise the power bestowed on us by our Framers to authorize the use of force — or to decline to do so — but to reassert some constraint on an executive grown to fond of the use of military power.
We took the first step last week when a bipartisan majority of this body voted to set before the Senate a War Powers Resolution on Venezuela. That was a strong, bipartisan signal that this chamber was unwilling to let the war powers of this body atrophy to the point where they are no more substantial than air.
Now we are on the precipice of that debate — whether we should again risk the lives of our service members to procure access to another nation’s oil — and the American people should see us weighing that cost.
The president has threatened the possibility of additional strikes in Venezuela, if Venezuela does not “behave.”
And by behave, I think we have to acknowledge that the behavior the president expects is for that country to share access to its oil wealth with American oil companies. Now, many of those companies are dubious about investing in Venezuela. Some believe it would take years or more than a decade to make that profitable. Whether it makes good business sense to them is their decision; but whether we use the military might of the United States of America to safeguard their investment is our decision, and I say, it is not worth risking the lives of our troops.
There are some deeply important questions as to the use of American military power that are implicated in this debate. Questions that deserve answers.
Will we see years of American gunships parked off of Venezuela as part of some new, amorphous “Donroe Doctrine”?
How do we expect to run another country of more than 20 million people?
Will U.S. forces be used to protect oil infrastructure in Venezuela?
Will our president continue to stand by the illegitimate regime that Maduro’s capture has left in place, or will we support the outcome of the last election in which Maduro’s opposition was triumphant?
Are we better off spending our nation’s time and taxes on Venezuela or should we spend them at home, to bring down costs and address the affordability crisis?
Our service members and their families deserve answers to these questions before we ask any service member to put their lives on the line.
Let us make sure they get those answers. Let us have this debate. Let us move beyond a Parliamentary point of order designed to hide from the American people the cost of our military involvement in Venezuela, the continuing cost of it.
Let us have the fulsome debate that deserves. Because at the center of this debate is a question of whether we want to risk our service members’ lives in order to secure the oil resources of another country. I do not believe it is worth doing so.
But let those who believe that it is worth the risk, the danger to our service members and their families, let them come to the Senate floor and make that argument. Let us have this debate.
Let’s not hide behind some Parliamentary maneuver to even avoid a conversation here. There hasn’t been a single hearing in committee, open hearing on this subject, not a fulsome debate over the use of our military power. Let us do so now.
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