President Donald Trump’s decision to use military force to capture Venezuela’s president has put Nicolás Maduro in a New York jail cell and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine into the national spotlight.
Throughout his 13 years in the Senate, Kaine has been a consistent critic of presidents — both Republicans and fellow Democrats — for what he believes is the misuse of American military power without congressional consent.
Kaine, then in just his second year in the Senate, clashed with President Barack Obama over whether Obama had authority to bomb the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, a terrorist group that had taken over territory in parts of Iraq and Syria. Obama said he did; Kaine said he didn’t.
In 2020, Kaine sponsored a resolution that would have prohibited the president — then Trump in his first term — from using military force against Iran unless it was in response to an imminent act. The measured passed both houses of Congress but Trump vetoed it, calling it a “very insulting resolution” that would limit his authority.
Over the years Kaine, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has campaigned for Congress to repeal the authorizations of force it passed in 1991 and 2002 to approve military action against Iraq, arguing that such open-ended resolutions allowed presidents to carry out military operations not contemplated decades ago. He was joined in that quest by a Republican senator, Todd Young of Indiana; they achieved their goal in December when the repeals were included in a larger bill funding national defense.
As the U.S. increased pressure on Venezuela in late December, Kaine joined with Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, to push a measure intended to block military force against Venezuela without congressional approval. “We shouldn’t stumble into an unnecessary war with Venezuela — risking U.S. servicemembers’ lives — with no congressional authorization and incomplete information about the Administration’s objectives, its legal rationale, and the potential consequences of a long-term conflict that could drive migration and irreparably fracture Venezuela,” Kaine said in a statement then.
Later he and three other senators — one of them Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky — introduced a different measure to block the use of military force in Venezuela.
Neither resolution came up for a vote.
After the military action this weekend in Venezuela, Kaine once again called upon Congress to reclaim its constitutional role in how the nation’s armed forces should be used. “This is an illegal war,” Kaine said in a video call with journalists. He called Trump’s decision to order military force “one of the most negative events to happen in my 13 years in the Senate.”
There are two overlapping issues here.
One is a matter of policy: Kaine does not believe that military action in Venezuela is justified, even if the president had congressional approval. The other is a constitutional matter, and that’s what has put Kaine at odds with presidents from both parties.
The Constitution makes the president the commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces but gives Congress the sole power to declare war. That power was more clear-cut in the 18th century when wars were formally declared and it took time to assemble a military force. Now we’re in an era where a president can order missile strikes at almost a moment’s notice. Given the slow communications of the 18th century, it was possible to declare war long before an adversary found out (peace, too; the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 was fought after a peace treaty had been signed in Europe). Today, it’s hard to reconcile constitutional formalities with the element of surprise sometimes required in military actions.
In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act that forbids a president from committing American troops to more than 60 days of military action without congressional approval. Presidents of both parties over the years have balked at that limitation and neither formally recognized it or challenged it. They typically file reports with Congress that the paperwork says makes them “consistent with” the act rather than “pursuant to” the act to avoid recognizing its legality.
Kaine, as he’s done throughout his Senate career, believes that Congress has ceded too much warmaking power to presidents and says it should “reclaim the solemn responsibilities on matters of war and peace assigned to Congress by the Constitution.”
The quote came from a formal statement Kaine issued last year. In his video call Saturday, Kaine was blunter: “It’s time for Congress to get its ass off the couch and do what it’s supposed to do.”
Kaine warned that Trump is “an increasingly erratic and declining president” who “wants an end run around Congress on war” in violation of the Constitution. The Republican defense of Trump’s action is generally that he simply used the military to help apprehend someone who has been indicted in federal court on drug charges. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, likened the action to the 1990 military intervention in Panama that apprehended that country’s president at the time. “Similar to Panama’s Manuel Noriega in 1990 who was later found guilty, the disputed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro will stand trial for drug trafficking charges in the United States,” Griffith said in a statement. Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Virginia Beach, said much the same: “The United States will not tolerate illegal drug trafficking that targets our nation and harms our people.”
This is not necessarily a traditional left vs. right political fight, even though at the moment it’s Democrats who question Trump’s authority and Republicans who don’t. In the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, intervened in Somalia and later authorized bombing Serbia, it was congressional Republicans who complained that he did not have congressional consent and wanted to invoke the War Powers Act. Over the weekend, the conservative National Review praised Maduro’s arrest but also wrote: “This should have been authorized by Congress, and any contemplated further deployment to ‘run’ the country should first be debated and authorized by Congress.”
Kaine said he’ll continue to push for a congressional vote on war powers. “I intend to do this repeatedly in the year to come,” he said. “Members of Congress lack the backbone, lack the courage to have that debate.”
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