Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the Senate will press President Joe Biden over multiple airstrikes against Houthis in Yemen without congressional approval.
Partial transcript as follows:
MARGARET BRENNAN: And we have one of those, a- agencies with us later in the program, though far smaller than the 13,000 employees of the UN. President Biden has talked about these U.S. strikes on the Houthis continuing. I know you have some issue with that.
KAINE: I do Margaret. Not with the notion that we have to protect our own ships, Naval or commercial, from the Houthis, and even strategically, protect the Red Sea from the Houthis, but there’s no congressional authorization for a war in Yemen or the Red Sea against the Houthis. None. The president has asserted that these strikes are about self defense and they’re designed to deter the Houthis, but the administration has also said that they believe that the attacks are going to continue and even escalate. As you know, I’m from Virginia. We have a lot of people in harm’s way in the Red Sea, in the Middle East right now on this mission. And what they want to know is, what’s the strategy? What’s the plan for deescalation? If the U.S. is going against the Houthis to protect shipping, shipping of other nations, what are other nations doing as part of this mission? That’s why a bipartisan group of senators, we wrote the president this week and said, what is the strategy? How will we deescalate? And what is the legal rationale that you are using when Congress hasn’t authorized this military action? And this week we’re gonna be digging heavily into those questions.
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