WASHINGTON — Democrats in Congress including New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim denounced the U.S. military’s surprise weekend raid on Venezuela as illegal, pledging to move quickly when Congress reconvenes this week to check President Donald Trump’s power to start wars.
Hours after approving an operation to seize Venezuela’s autocratic leader Nicolás Maduro, Trump said Saturday the U.S. would seize oil deposits in the South American country and “run” the nation for an unspecified period. “We are going to run the country for some time,” Trump said, adding that he was not afraid of “boots on the ground.”
Confusion continued as to who is running Venezuela after Trump’s declaration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio contradicted Trump on Sunday, saying the U.S. would not assume daily responsibility for governing Venezuela and instead force an “oil quarantine” to press for changes in the oil-rich nation.
Foreign heads of state denounced the attack — a roughly two-and-a-half-hour operation, according to U.S. military officials — that jolted the Venezuelan capital city of Caracas and killed dozens, while legal experts said it broke international law.
Congressional Democrats including Kim, a Democrat who held national security posts in the Obama administration, publicly fumed that Congress had not been briefed before the attack.
Asked why Congress was not briefed, as is required for significant military operations, Trump said: “Congress has a tendency to leak.”
The dark-of-night operation marks the most aggressive use of military force against Venezuela since the Trump administration mounted a campaign to topple the Maduro government last year. It also drew immediate comparisons with other U.S. military campaigns to overthrow overseas governments or invade foreign nations, including Panama in 1989, Kuwait in 1990 and Iraq in 2003.
For months, Trump has been threatening regime change in Venezuela and military forces have been conducting missile strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean.
Before Congress broke for the holidays, Congress passed legislation that became law to limit the president’s legal authority to attack other countries. In a significant shift, the law repealed two legal justifications presidents have used top deploy troops for decades — officially called “authorizations for the use of military force,” or AUMFs.
Though Congress passed that legislation, further efforts to limit presidential war powers in Washington, where Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House, face a rocky future as Republican allies continue to back Trump.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both Democrats from New York, demanded briefings this week. Republicans largely lauded Maduro’s capture. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, called the operation “decisive and justified,” and said the Trump administration was “working to schedule briefings for members as Congress returns to Washington.”
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said he will force a vote this week to block further military actions against Venezuela absent congressional approval.
Kaine tried to muster support for his resolution without success last year. Kaine’s measure and other efforts to limit Trump’s military options, would need to clear both chambers of Congress, and Trump would have to sign them, to enter into law.
“We’ve entered the 250th year of American democracy and cannot allow it to devolve into the tyranny that our founders fought to escape,” Kaine said.
Almost all Democrats and a few Republicans are expected to vote for his resolution.
A deepening entrenchment of the U.S. military abroad threatens to splinter wings of the Republican Party on Capitol Hill, where many diehard Trump-supporting lawmakers prefer an isolationist approach to foreign policy over a hawkish stance more traditional with Republicans.
“This is the same Washington playbook that we are so sick and tired of that doesn’t serve the American people, but actually serves the big corporations, the banks and the oil executives,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said on Sunday in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Greene, a devotee of the “America First” brand of politics that favors withdrawal from the global stage, is retiring from Congress this month after breaking with Trump over publication of government files about the deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump himself has criticized U.S. lethal intervention in foreign lands. At a 2016 Republican presidential debate he described the Iraq war that the U.S. began in 2003 as a “big, fat mistake.”
Speaking on Fox News on the weekend, Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, confirmed and defended the decision the administration made not to brief lawmakers. “That’s probably one reason it didn’t leak over these four days as they were waiting for the right weather,” Cotton said.
In posts online, Kim said Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “blatantly” lied to Congress during recent briefings about the Trump administration’s goals in Venezuela, which they said did not amount to regime change.
The action to seize Maduro was “disastrous,” Kim said. “Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war,” he wrote.
“President Trump ran on an America First platform that opposed regime change wars, yet this operation shows a clear shift from that position,” Rep. Donald Norcross (D-1st), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “Even more concerning, Congress was not informed beforehand, which is a clear violation of our Constitution.”
Credit: (AP Photo/Cristian Hernandez)After American warplanes early Saturday bombed Caracas, U.S. forces abducted Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and transported them to New York, where the Trump administration is pursuing criminal charges against the pair.
In its indictment, the Justice Department accused Maduro of leading a “corrupt, illegitimate government” powered through a broad drug-running network that inundated the U.S. with tons of cocaine.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd), a steady Trump ally who has criticized U.S. military involvement abroad, said Maduro “helped fuel the poison drug trade that’s killing Americans and destroying families.”
“America has a responsibility to stop this poison at the source before more Americans are murdered,” Van Drew said.
Maduro is being held in Brooklyn at a prison opened in the 1990s called the Metropolitan Detention Center, or MDC. He faces federal drug and weapons charges in the Southern District of New York, a jurisdiction known for high-profile criminal prosecutions, along with his wife, son and three other individuals.
In a joint statement, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay rejected the attack of Venezuela as a threat to stability in the region. “These actions constitute a dangerous precedent for peace, regional security and pose a risk to the civil population,” the joint statement added.
On Sunday, 26 members of the European Union urged restraint from all sides.
“Respecting the will of the Venezuelan people remains the only way for Venezuela to restore democracy and resolve the current crisis,” the bloc of nations said in a joint statement.
