Sen. Tim Kaine on Venezuelan Action - 'This Is an Illegal War'
Arguing Trump believes Congress is irrelevant, the Senator said: “It’s time for Congress to get its ass off the couch and do what the Constitution mandates that we do."
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
In a roughly 30-minute Zoom call with reporters Saturday afternoon, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va) called the military attack on Venezuela “one of the most significant negative events that has occurred during my 13 years in the Senate.”
“This is an illegal war,” he said. “There is no legal justification in the Constitution, in the history of the Constitution, or in American law that would authorize the president to wage war to depose President Maduro and seize its oil and run the country of Venezuela without coming to Congress.”
Kaine, who has served in the U.S. Senate since 2013, spoke of his long-held conviction that going to war is the “most consequential decision we ever engage in,” and that Congresses led by both Democrats and Republicans have turned over this responsibility “in a completely unlawful and even immoral way to presidents and allowed them to initiate unilateral war without notice to consultation with … or even voting in Congress.”
While he argued that this slide toward unilateral action by presidents has been many years in the making, he said that “the actions of the second Trump Administration have gone far beyond those that I’ve experienced in other administrations.”
Kaine was unequivocable in his call to return the decision to make war where it belongs — in Congress.
“It’s time for Congress to get its ass off the couch and do what the Constitution mandates that we do …. We have to put this before the American people … in public hearings by the key oversight committees — Intelligence, Armed Services, Foreign Relations … and explore whether the US should enter yet another war with unforeseen consequences both for the US, our troops and our region.”
It’s not just the actions against Venezuela that has Kaine’s attention, noting that Trump has acted unilaterally now against Iran, against terrorist groups within Nigeria, and against boats in international waters.
“It’s no surprise this president wants to end-run Congress on war,” he said. “He wants to end-run Congress on the imposition of tariffs; he wants to end-run Congress by not spending Congressionally appropriate dollars. He wants to end-run Congress in every way possible because he believes Congress is irrelevant.”
Next Steps
Kaine outlined two steps that Congress can take to check Trump’s actions.
The first is his own Venezuela War Power Resolution that is “currently pending and ripe for consideration in the US Senate.” That resolution simply states the the country shouldn’t be a war with Venezuela without Congressional approval.
The second would be for Congress to place within the Defense Appropriation Bill a prohibition of use of funds in Venezuela.
When Kaine first brought the resolution before the Senate earlier this year, Kaine got two Republicans to sign on, but that wasn’t enough to carry it.
Kaine noted during the meeting that some of his Republican colleagues felt that Trump’s threats against Venezuela were bluffs that were part of a larger strategy to deal with President Maduro.
“Now my colleagues see this is not a bluff,” Kaine said. “Now my colleagues see President Trump unable to give a clear explanation about what this is for. Narcotrafficking, regime change, seizure of oil. They’ve watched the president unable to give a clear description” for how the United States will run Venezuela.
And, he continued, “They’ve watched the president and the Secretary of State suggest that Cuba should be next.”
Monroe Doctrine
Kaine spent two years as a missionary in Honduras in 1980 and 1981. He is a fluent Spanish speaker and remains engaged with the region.
Through his time living in Honduras, and in the years since, Kaine told reporters that “There is a painful history of U.S. attempts to dominate countries in the Americas. The Monroe Doctrine was something that we cast off during the FDR presidency because it was disrespectful.”
That doctrine saw countries in the Americas as subservient to the United States. “We need to treat nations as partners,” the Senator said.
“Returning to a Monroe Doctrine where the US asserts that it has the ability to dominate nations and invade their internal politics for any reason we so choose,” he said, “has been disastrous in the past and will be disastrous in the future.”
He pointed out that in just the past couple of weeks, the Chinese “released a strategic document about Latin America … trying to take advantage of the Trump Administration’s decisions to not treat America nations as equals but as dependents we can push around.”
In concluding his remarks, Kaine said that he will push repeatedly this year to reassert Congress’ role.
“The institutions that were put in place at the foundation of this nation still have vitality, and we’re not a nation that wants to devolve back to tyrannical decisionmaking by an executive prone to erratic, chaotic” actions.
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
Support Award-winning, Locally Focused Journalism
The FXBG Advance cuts through the talking points to deliver both incisive and informative news about the issues, people, and organizations that daily affect your life. And we do it in a multi-partisan format that has no equal in this region. Over the past year, our reporting was:
First to break the story of Stafford Board of Supervisors dismissing a citizen library board member for “misconduct,” without informing the citizen or explaining what the person allegedly did wrong.
First to explain falling water levels in the Rappahannock Canal.
First to detail controversial traffic numbers submitted by Stafford staff on the Buc-ee’s project
Our media group also offers the most-extensive election coverage in the region and regular columnists like:
And our newsroom is led by the most-experienced and most-awarded journalists in the region — Adele Uphaus (Managing Editor and multiple VPA award-winner) and Martin Davis (Editor-in-Chief, 2022 Opinion Writer of the Year in Virginia and more than 25 years reporting from around the country and the world).
For just $8 a month, you can help support top-flight journalism that puts people over policies.
Your contributions 100% support our journalists.
Help us as we continue to grow!
This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”
The Venezuela strike is not a one-off aberration; it is a vivid expression of a larger project that fuses executive overreach, oligarchic ambition, and a willingness to discard both constitutional limits and international law. Senator Tim Kaine is right to insist that this is an “illegal war” and that Congress has surrendered its core duty to decide when the nation goes to war. But to understand how dangerous this moment is, we have to place it in the broader strategy that has been hiding in plain sight.
In recent years, elites aligned with Project 2025 and similar blueprints have mapped out an American future in which democratic checks are treated as obstacles to be neutralized, not guardrails to be respected. These documents imagine a presidency unbound by traditional constraints, a bureaucracy purged and made personally loyal, and courts reshaped to ratify an aggressive “unitary executive” theory. As Anne Applebaum argues in Autocracy, Inc., twenty‑first‑century strongmen and their oligarch’s function less as isolated dictators and more as a global corporation of autocracy, using financial loopholes, propaganda, and mutual protection to entrench their power and wealth while rewriting the rules of the international system in their favor. Layered on top of that is the U.S. 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly carves the globe into spheres of influence where favored leaders and oligarchs are free to extract wealth with minimal interference, so long as they align with Washington’s power project.
What is playing out in Venezuela looks disturbingly like that model in action: a resource-rich country treated as a spoil of war; a people reduced to pawns in a contest over oil, contracts, and geopolitical bragging rights; and neighboring states warned to fall in line or risk similar treatment. This is not the rule of law; it is a privatized imperialism in which public power is deployed for private gain.
Congress is supposed to be the first line of defense against such abuse. The war power, the purse, and the impeachment power exist precisely so that no president can unilaterally plunge the country into wars of choice or convert the state into an instrument of oligarchic plunder. The Supreme Court, too, has a constitutional duty: to reject theories that turn the president into an elected monarch, and to defend the fundamental principle that no one is above the law.
None of that will happen by itself. It is time to organize more deeply, protest more visibly, and take back Congress in this year’s elections so that constitutional checks, and not oligarchic greed, set the course of American power.
Again, as happens with most editorials from a certain local writer I could mention.....ahem...... while Senator Kaine's statement is true, what's NOT said in the spirit of "bipartisanship" (read appeasement) is that these arrogant, horrendous actions of illegality and empire building did not happen in a vacuum.
Although, like most actions by this cynical administration, they occurred with an eye toward when they would be under the least media scrutiny (weekend/holiday), were announced after the fact, even to Congress, rather than before - and happened when they could provide the most distraction from other actions by Trump - such as the recent, court ordered data dump of some of the files showing his lies regarding his ward, Epstein, who conveniently died under his care - the fact is this administration has been quite open about their intent to do exactly what they did.
They published a strategic paper months ago that clearly stated they were abandoning international principles of law and we would now become a robber nation, stealing from others in our hemisphere while ignoring such actions by other totalitarian states such as Russia and China.
And not only have local Republican Congressional members such as Wittman and Cline become complicit in their silence, along with their party leaders such as Johnson, Scott, Graham, Jordan, et.al.; we can no longer pretend and give a pass to the local members of that party which have chosen to ride along and pretend these atrocities have nothing to do with them.
No one is making them be a part of this. They too should bear the burden and shame for what they have hired to be done on their, and through our system of government - our behalf.
Unjustly, unwisely, cruelly, illegally.
Again, rights not given to all are rights not given to any. Merely privilege.
If we, as a nation, cannot see fit to obey the law for moral reasons, whatever that says about our honor; as the nation that has arguably benefitted the most from a world order based upon rule of law, we should do so as a matter of pragmatism and cold hard calculation.
While "kick their ass, and take their gas" might have made a funny bumper sticker back in the 70's, it is hardly a sound policy for the world's militarily mightiest country in the 21st century.
If the only way our capitalist system can survive is by stealing from others, then it is not really capitalism, merely theft dressed up for appearances sake. Fooling no one, shaming ourselves.
This will not end well. Not only for them, but for us.
Do not act surprised if the states of the Southern Hemisphere do not unite and rise against us.
Wouldn't we do the same, if the tables were turned?
I would.