President Trump’s troop withdrawal from Syria was “a mistake,” the Senate’s top Republican said Wednesday — but he acknowledged there aren’t many options for Congress to rope him in.
“What tools do we have?” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters who peppered him with questions about the next steps as Capitol Hill tries to figure out what it can do.
The Kentucky Republican said there’s a consensus among GOP senators that the president’s surprise announcement last week that he was pulling U.S. troops out, freeing Turkey to invade a Kurdish part of Syria, was a bungle.
But he said presidents have great latitude in deploying troops, limiting what lawmakers can do.
He suggested Congress might be able to blunt the roughest outcomes of the president’s decision by approving new sanctions on Turkey — expanding on a step Mr. Trump already took himself to impose sanctions this week.
“As messy as Syria was, this was working pretty well,” Mr. McConnell said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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