How Venezuela consumed Congress this week

By Michael Jones

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) entered the press workspace next to the viewing gallery inside the Senate chamber on Wednesday with a simple question: Did the assembled group of reporters know that it was Rand Paul’s birthday?

Paul, the contrarian libertarian senator known for a political brand that blends fiscal hawkishness and civil-liberties absolutism, had arrived moments earlier and seemed to demur at his colleague’s shoutout. And though, in fact, it was the Kentucky Republican’s 63rd birthday, none of us were there for a celebration.

Instead, I was among roughly two dozen reporters assembled for a discussion with the two senators on the urgency for Congress to reassert its constitutional authority to authorize and sustain U.S. military conflict in light of the strikes on Venezuela last weekend that resulted in  President Nicolás Maduro and his wife being captured and flown to New York City to be tried on drug trafficking charges.

The operation was the culmination of a campaign the Trump administration has escalated in Caribbean and near Venezuelan waters since early last fall by authorizing U.S. forces to strike multiple maritime vessels it described as drug-smuggling threats. The initial strike on a Venezuelan-origin boat on Sep. 2 marked the first use of lethal force in the region in decades. Similar operations continued through late 2025 as part of what the administration framed as a counternarcotics and “narco-terrorism” effort that included stepped-up naval and air deployments, sanctions, and a formal designation of Venezuela’s state-embedded criminal networks as terrorist organizations.

Lawmakers like Kaine and Paul worry the Maduro operation could spiral into a prolonged war because the surprise military action—conducted without clear congressional authorization—risks entangling the United States in a sustained campaign beyond a one-off raid, enabled in part due to Congress’s being MIA in fulfilling its oversight responsibility of the executive branch.

“We’re four plus months [since the first boat strike], and I think more than 200 combatants have been killed, either on open waters or in Venezuela. American troops have been injured, a couple are still in the hospital,” Kaine told us. “But not a single public hearing in Armed Services or Foreign Relations, in [Intelligence], in Judiciary in either house—not a single public hearing.”

Paul argued that Maduro being a despot was not enough to justify the administration’s unilateral action.

“The debate really isn’t about good or evil, bad or good. There’s a lot of evil in the world,” he said. “The question is about who has the power to take the country to war.”

And on Thursday afternoon, the Senate took a major step in reasserting that power when it advanced a resolution led by Kaine and Paul to restrict President Trump’s ability to conduct further military action without congressional authorization. Five Republicans joined every Democrat on the measure.

“This was a big win today to have every Democrat unified for the principle that this needs to be taken out of the SCIF and put before the American public so they can see what’s at stake and whether the administration has a plan or not,” Kaine said in reference to the enclosed area where members view classified information concerning sensitive intelligence sources, methods or analytical processes.

The war powers vote was the final major headline of a legislative week consumed by Venezuela.

Senior Trump administration officials were on Capitol Hill on Monday evening to brief national security lawmakers and returned on Wednesday for all-member briefings for both chambers. As I reported in my newsletter, many top Democrats entered those classified presentations with deep skepticism about the conclusions they expected to hear, given the administration’s justification for moving against Maduro without congressional authorization.

A member who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter told me that the officials spent more time discussing the details of the operation than on what comes next as the Trump administration pushes for deeper diplomatic engagement and wants leverage over Caracas’s oil sector and broader policy direction.

On the day of the member briefings, a dozen Democratic veterans publicly tore into the Trump administration’s military intervention in Venezuela, describing it as an unconstitutional act of war carried out without congressional authorization. Similar to Kaine and Ryan, they raised alarms about the lack of transparency around the operation, the risks to U.S. service members, and the prospect of long-term instability in the region. 

Several questioned whether the mission was driven more by oil interests than by national security or law enforcement concerns. The group called for aggressive congressional oversight, accountability from the administration, and the introduction of war powers resolutions to block any further unauthorized use of force—arguing that the Constitution, not the White House, sets the rules for war.

“The Department of Defense is the last line of defense. It is not something that you use to bend the world to your will whenever you feel like it. And effectively, that’s what this administration is doing without any clarity as to why we’re doing this,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), an Air Force vet and member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, said. “And I think that it is important and impactful when people like us—people who have served anywhere from the Vietnam War through Desert Storm, through all of the current and modern wars—remember our history well enough to know that this is not what we put in this service to do. This is not what our oath is about.”

In addition to the Kaine-Paul resolution, which will be debated and potentially amended next week, Reps. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) reintroduced a bipartisan resolution to block further U.S. hostilities within or against Venezuela absent explicit authorization from Congress. (A nearly identical resolution introduced by the three lawmakers forced a floor debate last month and failed by two votes.)

But despite the urgent desire for Congress to reassert its war powers, any swift correction is unlikely, as lawmakers have spent decades quietly ceding that authority to the executive branch. Since World War II, presidents of both parties have repeatedly launched and sustained military operations without formal congressional approval, often under broad interpretations of commander-in-chief authority or ambiguous statutory authorizations, and Congress has rarely pushed back effectively through formal votes or clear limits on those powers. 

Over time, this has eroded legislative leverage and normalized unilateral executive action, meaning that even now, with growing bipartisan concern about Venezuela and measures like the war powers resolutions in play, it will take sustained political will and institutional reform for Congress to reclaim the role the founders assigned it.

“In my view, congressional oversight over the executive is a muscle,” Kaine told reporters in October during a discussion ahead of the failed vote on his first war powers resolution related to Venezuela. “And it’s a muscle that’s atrophied. The only way to get a muscle stronger is to exercise it.”

Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.