The Senate on Wednesday voted across party lines to move forward a bill that would end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen.
The Senate voted 63-37 to pass the procedural vote, which will set up a floor debate on the resolution next week.
The bipartisan vote was viewed as a rebuke to both Saudi Arabia and the Trump Administration, which is leading the war in Yemen, and President Trump for their handling of the Jamal Khashoggi murder, Senate leaders said.
“The Saudis have gone off the rails. They’ve killed more civilians this year than any year prior in the Yemen war,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told AFP.
“They obviously made a giant strategic error in abducting and murdering Jamal Khashoggi. So, a lot has changed in the last few months to get us to this point.”
The vote came after a briefing to Senators by Trump administration officials in which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there was “no direct reporting” connecting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the murder of the US resident journalist, and Defense Secretary James Mattis said there was “no smoking gun” making the connection.
The conclusions, and the fact that CIA director Gina Haspel didn’t appear, angered some Senators.
New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, speculated that Haspel didn’t attend because she “would have said with a high degree of confidence that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was involved in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”
Pompeo and Mattis both came to Capitol Hill to urgently lobby against the Yemen resolution, which would call for an end to U.S. military assistance for the conflict that human rights advocates say is wreaking havoc on Yemen and subjecting civilians to indiscriminate bombing.
Khashoggi, who lived in the U.S. and wrote for The Washington Post, was killed in the Saudi Embassy in Turkey. U.S. intelligence officials believe the Saudi crown prince must have at least known of the plot to kill him.
Trump has cast doubt on who is to blame for the murder.
The motion is likely to go not get passed the Senate because the House GOP leaders have not indicated they would take it up before the end of this Congress.
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