On the same afternoon that King Charles III stood before a joint session of Congress and pleaded for democratic solidarity and the preservation of the rules-based international order, the Senate quietly voted to remove one of the last remaining congressional checks on a potential U.S. military strike against Cuba.
The vote was 51-47.
Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic-led resolution that would have barred President Donald Trump from military action against Cuba without congressional approval — voting almost entirely along party lines on a procedural measure that killed the war powers resolution before it could advance.
Only two Republicans broke with their party: Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky voted in favor of advancing the measure. Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman was the only member of his party to vote against it.
The vote does not authorize a military strike on Cuba. It does something arguably more significant: it removes the Senate as an obstacle to one.
The pattern is now established across Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba — the Republican majority has voted down every attempt to require congressional authorization for Trump’s military operations in the hemisphere. The president’s ability to act unilaterally on such matters — should he choose to — has been confirmed by the chamber that is constitutionally empowered to constrain it.
What Was Being Voted On
The resolution, introduced by Senators Tim Kaine, Ruben Gallego, and Adam Schiff, would have declared that the U.S. blockade of Cuba constitutes military “hostilities” — and therefore requires congressional authorization under the War Powers Act.
U.S. forces have used Coast Guard and naval assets to intercept or deter fuel shipments bound for Cuba — sharply restricting supplies to an island already in crisis. Kaine argued on the Senate floor that these operations constitute hostile military action. “If anyone were doing to the United States what we are doing to Cuba,” he said, “we would definitely regard it as an act of war.”
Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who introduced the point of order that killed the resolution, countered that a war powers vote was not appropriate because Trump has not deployed troops, arguing there are no active U.S. hostilities against Cuba. His motion succeeded. The resolution died without a full floor vote.
“Some may think this isn’t a necessary concern,” said Senator Peter Welch of Vermont before the vote. “But to quote the president of the United States, our commander in chief: ‘Cuba’s next.’ This is urgent and it requires immediate attention by the United States Senate.”
What Trump Has Said
The context for the resolution is not speculative. It is the president’s own words.
Trump said “Cuba is next” during a conference in Miami in March — the city where the largest Cuban exile community in the world lives, and where the political support for regime change in Havana is most concentrated. He has repeatedly suggested the U.S. could “take” Cuba or pursue regime change there. He has framed Cuba’s government as being on the verge of collapse — a characterization that the CIA Havana talks, the blockade’s humanitarian toll, and the island’s cascading power failures have done nothing to contradict.
Under Trump, U.S. forces have launched strikes on boats off Venezuela’s coast and the Eastern Pacific, gone into Caracas to seize President Nicolás Maduro, and waged war on Iran — all without prior authorization from Congress. The Senate has voted down every attempt to check those operations, and Tuesday’s vote on Cuba extends that pattern explicitly to the Caribbean.
The significance is not only what has already happened. It is the precedent being established for what could happen.
The Humanitarian Reality Beneath the Vote
The war powers debate in Washington is taking place against a backdrop of documented suffering on the ground in Cuba that neither side of the Senate aisle is fully accounting for.
Cuba is suffering from chronic water and power outages after decades of public mismanagement over the island’s core infrastructure systems, only exacerbated by U.S. sanctions and interruptions in oil shipments from Venezuela. The Trump administration is pressing Cuba’s leadership to end political repression, release political prisoners, and liberalize its ailing economy.
Senator Kaine (D-VA) said the blockade had caused “humanitarian crises across Cuba,” including disrupting medical care, leaving millions of people without clean water, and spiking food prices. These conditions are not contested. What is contested — and what Tuesday's vote resolved in the executive's favor — is whether addressing them militarily requires a democratic mandate from the legislature.
For Miami’s Cuban community — the largest outside Cuba, and the community most directly affected by whatever happens next — the vote lands with particular weight. The exile community has long pushed for a harder line on Havana. Many within it support regime change. The Senate vote removes a procedural obstacle to the action they have been waiting for. It also removes the congressional deliberation that, in a functioning democracy, is supposed to precede the use of military force.
The Constitutional Question Nobody is Answering
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was passed specifically to prevent presidents from committing U.S. forces to military operations without congressional authorization — a response to the Vietnam War and the expansion of executive power that preceded it. It has been contested, circumvented, and reinterpreted by every administration since its passage.
Tuesday’s vote is the latest chapter in that half-century argument.
Republicans have almost unanimously voted down war powers resolutions on Venezuela, Iran, and now Cuba — accusing Democrats of using the War Powers Act to weaken the Trump administration on issues of foreign policy.
Democrats have failed repeatedly in both the Senate and House to force Trump to obtain congressional authorization for military operations.
The constitutional argument — that Congress, not the president, can declare war — is not a Democratic or Republican position. It is written into Article I of the Constitution. What Tuesday’s vote demonstrated is that in the current political environment, each party, whenever in power in the executive office, asserts the right to unilateral military action, and the party currently in control of the Senate has decided, three times in the span of a single year, that the president does not need their permission to use military force in the hemisphere.
Cuba is 90 miles from Florida. The last time the United States and Cuba brought the world to the edge of nuclear war over a military confrontation in that stretch of water, it was called the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Senate voted Tuesday to ensure that the next move, if there is one, belongs entirely to the president.
