The Senate voted on Thursday to end American military assistance for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen in the strongest show of bipartisan defiance against President Trump’s defense of the kingdom over the killing of a dissident journalist.

The 56-to-41 vote was a rare move by the Senate to limit presidential war powers and sent a potent message of disapproval for a nearly four-year conflict that has killed thousands of civilians and brought famine to Yemen. Moments later, senators unanimously approved a separate resolution to hold Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia personally responsible for the death of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

Together, the votes were an extraordinary break with Mr. Trump, who has refused to condemn the prince and dismissed United States intelligence agencies’ conclusions that the heir to the Saudi throne directed the grisly killing.

While the House will not take up the measure by the end of the year, the day’s votes signal that Congress will take on Mr. Trump’s support of Saudi Arabia when Democrats take control of the House next month.
The action indicated a growing sense of urgency among lawmakers in both parties to punish Saudi Arabia for Mr. Khashoggi’s death, and to question a tradition of Washington averting its gaze from the kingdom’s human rights abuses in the interest of preserving a strategically important relationship.

“What the Khashoggi event did, I think, was to focus on the fact that we have been led into this civil war in Yemen, half a world away, into a conflict in which few Americans that I know can articulate what American national security interest is at stake,” said Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah. “And we’ve done so, following the lead of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

The resolution was written by Mr. Lee and Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont. It was an unusual invocation of the War Powers Act, a 1973 law by which Congress sought at the end of the Vietnam War to reassert its constitutional role in deciding when the United States would go to war.

Mr. Sanders called it the first time Congress had used the law to make clear “that the constitutional responsibility for making war rests with the United States Congress, not the White House.”

AFP.