President Donald Trump has raged at a group of Republican senators who joined Democrats in an effort to block future military action in Venezuela without congressional approval.
His post on Truth Social came less than two hours after five Republicans joined every Senate Democrat to vote 52 to 47 to advance the legislation in a stunning rebuke of the president.
“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,” Trump wrote.
The president then proceeded to name-check every GOP senator who voted in support of the joint resolution in the effort to rein in Trump’s power.
“Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Josh Hawley, and Todd Young should never be elected to office again,” the president whined in his post.
Paul joined Democrats in introducing the resolution and has repeatedly been a vocal critic of the president, while Collins and Murkowski have also bucked him in the past. However, Hawley and Young have largely been close MAGA allies throughout the president’s second term so far.
“This Vote greatly hampers American Self Defense and National Security, impeding the President’s Authority as Commander in Chief,” Trump ranted. “In any event, and despite their ‘stupidity,’ the War Powers Act is Unconstitutional, totally violating Article II of the Constitution, as all Presidents, and their Departments of Justice, have determined before me.”
But the group of senators did not see it that way as they moved to restrict the president from using further military action in Venezuela without prior authorization.
“With regard to Venezuela, my read of the Constitution is that if the President feels the need to put boots on the ground there in the future, Congress would need to vote on it. That’s why I voted yes on this morning’s Senate resolution,” wrote Hawley on X.
The GOP pushback came after the U.S. carried out a strike on Venezuela early Saturday and captured former President Nicolas Maduro.
The president has since insisted the U.S. is “in charge” of the country and has refused to rule out boots on the ground. In an interview with The New York Times, Trump indicated the U.S. could run the country for years.
Some of the Republicans who voted in support of the resolution praised the removal of Maduro but argued that if the next steps involve the use of the military, it must be debated by Congress.
“The President and members of his team have stated that the United States now ‘runs’ Venezuela. It is unclear if that means that an American military presence will be required to stabilize the country,” Young said in a statement.
He noted that the president campaigned against forever wars and said he strongly supported Trump for that position.
But the president indicated the fight over restricting his ability to use the military for an invasion of Venezuela is not over.
The measure faces some procedural steps before final passage in the Senate. It’s not clear whether it will get a vote in the House. The president also has veto power.
Even while the president raged about it, Vice President JD Vance dismissed concerns that the president was losing his grip on GOP lawmakers.
Vance argued that some of the GOP senators who voted in support of the war powers resolution did so more on a legal technicality than as a policy disagreement with the president.
He also claimed the War Powers Act, a federal law intended to check the president’s power to commit to an armed conflict, was “fundamentally a fake and unconstitutional law” that won’t change anything regarding how the administration conducts foreign policy.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth briefed lawmakers on the Venezuela operation and laid out a plan for the U.S. to extract and sell oil from the country while keeping the military blockade in place moving forward.
Republicans largely backed the outline, but Democrats warned it raised more questions.
