{"id":167389,"date":"2025-10-09T09:21:45","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T09:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/senate-republicans-vote-against-check-on-trump-using-deadly-force-against-cartels-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T09:21:45","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T09:21:45","slug":"senate-republicans-vote-against-check-on-trump-using-deadly-force-against-cartels-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/senate-republicans-vote-against-check-on-trump-using-deadly-force-against-cartels-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Senate Republicans vote against check on Trump using deadly force against cartels – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

First vote in Congress on military campaign that White House says has hit four vessels and killed at least 21 people
Senate Republicans voted down legislation Wednesday that would have put a check on Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s ability to use deadly military force against drug cartels after Democrats tried to counter the administration\u2019s extraordinary assertion of presidential war powers to destroy vessels in the Caribbean.
The vote fell mostly along party lines, 48-51, with two Republicans, Rand Paul<\/a> and Lisa Murkowski, voting in favor and the Democrat John Fetterman voting against.
It was the first vote in Congress on Trump\u2019s military campaign, which according to the White House has so far destroyed four vessels, killed at least 21 people and stopped narcotics from reaching the US. The war powers resolution would have required the president to seek authorization from Congress before further military strikes on the cartels.
The Trump administration<\/a> has asserted that drug traffickers are armed combatants threatening the United States, creating justification to use military force. But that assertion has been met with some unease on Capitol Hill.
Some Republicans<\/a> are asking the White House for more clarification on its legal justification and specifics on how the strikes are conducted, while Democrats insist they are violations of US and international law. It\u2019s a clash that could redefine how the world\u2019s most powerful military uses lethal force and set the tone for future global conflict.
The White House had indicated Trump would veto the legislation, and even though the Senate vote failed, it gave lawmakers an opportunity to go on the record with their objections to Trump\u2019s declaration that the US is in \u201carmed conflict\u201d with drug cartels.
\u201cIt sends a message when a significant number of legislators say: \u2018Hey, this is a bad idea,\u2019\u201d said the senator Tim Kaine<\/a>, a Virginia Democrat who pushed the resolution alongside Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California.
Wednesday\u2019s vote was brought under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was intended to reassert congressional power over the declaration of war.
\u201cCongress must not allow the executive branch to become judge, jury and executioner,\u201d Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has long pushed for greater congressional oversight of war powers, said during a floor speech.
Paul was the only Republican to publicly speak in favor of the resolution before the vote, but a number of Republican senators have questioned the strikes on vessels and said they are not receiving enough information from the administration.
The senator Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, acknowledged \u201cthere may be some concern\u201d in the Republican conference about the strikes. However, Republican leaders stridently argued against the resolution on the Senate floor Wednesday, calling it a political ploy from Democrats<\/a>.
\u201cPeople were attacking our country by bringing in poisonous substances to deposit into our country that would have killed Americans,\u201d said the senator Jim Risch, the chair of the Senate foreign relations committee. \u201cFortunately most of those drugs are now at the bottom of the ocean.\u201d
Risch thanked Trump for his actions and added that he hoped the military strikes would continue.
Members of the Senate armed services committee received a classified briefing last week on the strikes, and Cramer said he was \u201ccomfortable with at least the plausibility of their legal argument\u201d. But, he added, no one representing intelligence agencies or the military command structure for Central and South America was present for the briefing.
\u201cI\u2019d be more comfortable defending the administration if they shared the information,\u201d he said.
Kaine also said the briefing did not include any information on why the military chose to destroy the vessels rather than interdict them or get into the specifics of how the military was so confident the vessels were carrying drugs.
\u201cMaybe they were engaged in human trafficking, or maybe it was the wrong ship,\u201d Schiff said. \u201cWe just have little or no information about who was onboard these ships or what intelligence was used or what the rationale was and how certain we could be that everyone on that ship deserved to die.\u201d
The Democrats also said the administration has told them it is adding cartels to a list of organizations deemed \u201cnarco-terrorists\u201d that are targets for military strikes, but it has not shown the lawmakers a complete list.
\u201cThe slow erosion of congressional oversight is not an abstract debate about process,\u201d the senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, said in a floor speech. \u201cIt is a real and present threat to our democracy.\u201d
The secretary of state Marco Rubio<\/a> visited the Republican conference for lunch Wednesday to emphasize to senators that they should vote against the legislation. He told the senators that the administration was treating cartels like governmental entities because they had seized control of large portions of some Caribbean nations, according to the senator John Hoeven of North Dakota.
Rubio told reporters at the Capitol: \u201cThese drug-trafficking organizations are a direct threat to the safety and security of the United States to unleash violence and criminality on our streets, fueled by the drugs and the drug profits that they make. \u2026 And the president, as the commander in chief, has an obligation to keep our country safe.\u201d
Still, Democrats said the recent buildup of US maritime forces in the Caribbean was a sign of shifting US priorities and tactics that could have grave repercussions. They worried that further military strikes could set off a conflict with Venezuela<\/a> and argued that Congress should be actively deliberating whenever American troops are sent to war.
Schiff said, \u201cThis is the kind of thing that leads a country, unexpectedly and unintentionally, into war.\u201d<\/p>\n

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First vote in Congress on military campaign that White House says has hit four vessels and killed at least 21 peopleSenate Republicans voted down legislation Wednesday that would have put a check on Donald Trump\u2019s ability to use deadly military force against drug cartels after Democrats tried to counter the administration\u2019s extraordinary assertion of presidential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":167390,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}