The Senate is due to vote on Wednesday on whether to cut US military support for the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen, amid deepening scepticism over the Trump administration’s alliance with Riyadh.
The independent senator Bernie Sanders succeeded in forcing a vote on the resolution after a Republican revolt on 28 November – driven in part by outrage over the Saudi murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi – defeated the Trump administration’s efforts to stop it going to a vote.
Wednesday’s vote marks the first time a measure invoking the 1973 War Powers Resolution, asserting congressional supremacy in matters of war and peace, has progressed so far in the Senate. The vote comes across the backdrop of peace talks in Stockholm in a UN-brokered effort to halt a war that is thought to have already killed many tens of thousands of civilians, mostly from coalition bombing and starvation, largely as a results of the coalition’s strategy of economic strangulation.
A vote on a parallel measure in the House of Representatives was blocked by the House speaker, Paul Ryan, using a procedural ploy, attaching a clause stripping it of privileged status to an unrelated agricultural bill. The bill was narrowly approved by 206 to 203.
“This is why people hate Congress,” Ro Khanna, the resolution’s lead author, said in a tweet. “[Ryan] is not allowing a vote on my resolution to stop the war in Yemen because many Republicans will vote with us and he will lose the vote. He is disgracing Article 1 of the Constitution, and as a result, more Yemnini [sic] children will die.”
The UN has warned that a continuation of the Yemen conflict could tip the impoverished nation into the worst famine the world has seen for 100 years.
The Yemen resolution is part of a flurry of congressional action this week, all aimed at rebuking Riyadh and the Trump administration for its staunch support of the Saudi monarchy. A resolution backed by the Senate Republican leadership would condemn Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the Khashoggi murder, while a bill before the foreign relations committee would cut arms sales.
The CIA director, Gina Haspel, briefed the House leadership on the Khashoggi killing in a classified meeting on Wednesday, while the secretaries of state and defence, Mike Pompeo and James Mattis, are due to brief lawmakers on the wider relationship with Saudi Arabia on Thursday.
The initial battle on Wednesday was over the scope of amendments allowed to the measure proposed by Sanders, the Republican Mike Lee and the Democrat Chris Murphy.
In an effort to sink the measure, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is expected to try to keep it open to unrelated amendments, but its supporters succeeded in limiting amendments to relevant issues.
The chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, Bob Corker, said he supported limiting amendments, as did Kansas senator, Jerry Moran, in a tweet on Tuesday saying: “This is important to protect the integrity of the resolution and to pass it in a timely matter.”
“Today the US Senate will vote on whether to end US support for the devastating Saudi-led war in Yemen,” Sanders said on Twitter. “This would be the first time ever that the Senate has voted to end an unauthorized war. We must finally end US involvement in this humanitarian and strategic disaster.”
“The Senate must reassert its constitutional authority and end our support of this unauthorized and unconstitutional war.”
Even if passed, the resolution would have to go to the House of Representatives, where Republican leaders have said the will resist it until they relinquish control of the chamber next month.
If a joint resolution does emerge from the reconciliation process, it would then face the prospect of a presidential veto, requiring a two-thirds majority in both houses to override it.
Scott Anderson, a former state department legal adviser now at the Brookings Institution, said that although the resolution faced an uphill struggle to become law, it should pass the Senate and the House after a Democratic majority takes its seats in January.
“This vote really put the administration in a dangerous political context,” Anderson said. “It is increasingly evident members of the president’s own party have no confidence in his handling of Saudi and Yemen policy.”
