The
United States Senate killed a resolution introduced by Independent
Senator Bernie Sanders and Republican Senator Mike Lee to withdraw
U.S. military support for the Saudi war in Yemen. By a vote of 55-44,
the resolution was tabled. A simple majority was required to kill the
resolution.
If
ten Democrats who voted to kill the resolution had instead voted no,
an extraordinary debate on Saudi Arabia and U.S. support for the war
in Yemen would have taken place.
Democratic
Senators Christopher Coons, Catherine Cortez Masto, Joe Donnelly,
Heidi Heitkamp, Doug Jones, Joe Manchin, Robert Menendez, Bill
Nelson, Jack Reed, and Sheldon Whitehouse each voted against debating
whether to exercise Congress’s war powers under the Constitution.
The
outcome was similar to a vote on a resolution introduced by
Republican Senator Rand Paul to oppose the sale of arms to Saudi
Arabia. It failed by four votes, and if five Democrats had not voted
to preserve the arms deals, the effort to block $500 million worth of
weapons would have prevailed.
Republican
Senator Bob Corker, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, led the effort to stop the resolution from Sanders and
Lee. He was livid that senators invoked the War Powers Act of 1973 to
attempt to end U.S. military support for intervention by Saudi Arabia
in a war against the Houthis, particularly because it circumvented
his authority as the Foreign Relations Committee chair.
Corker
said, “Let the Foreign Relations Committee do the work you’ve
assigned the committee to do. We’re going to have a hearing.”
He mentioned a bipartisan bill apparently in the works on Yemen. He
cautioned against allowing a “wild west debate” on
war-making powers of the Executive Branch.
Full
report:
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