{"id":137,"date":"2026-05-28T04:19:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T04:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=137"},"modified":"2026-05-28T04:19:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T04:19:11","slug":"democrats-condemn-trumps-venezuela-strikes-as-republicans-largely-cheer-maduros-capture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=137","title":{"rendered":"Democrats condemn Trump\u2019s Venezuela strikes as Republicans largely cheer Maduro\u2019s capture"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

As details about the Trump administration\u2019s military strikes on Venezuela and the capture of President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro emerged on Saturday morning, Democrats and Republicans had largely opposing reactions to the operation, which congressional lawmakers did not approve and had no prior knowledge about.<\/p>\n

Read more The key thing missing from Trump\u2019s regime change plan<\/a><\/p>\n

Democratic lawmakers, who uniformly condemned the attack and criticized the administration\u2019s lack of plans following Maduro\u2019s ouster,<\/strong> demanded answers. House Democrats scheduled an emergency virtual caucus meeting for Sunday afternoon.<\/p>\n

\u201cPresident Trump\u2019s unauthorized military attack on Venezuela to arrest Maduro \u2014 however terrible he is \u2014 is a sickening return to a day when the United States asserted the right to dominate the internal political affairs of all nations in the Western Hemisphere,\u201d said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, in a statement. \u201cThat history is replete with failures, and doubling down on it makes it difficult to make the claim with a straight face that other countries should respect the United States\u2019 sovereignty when we do not do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaine, who is also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on Congress to \u201creassert its critical constitutional role\u201d in foreign policy matters and said his resolution to curtail the administration\u2019s hostilities against Venezeula without congressional authority will be up for a vote next week. <\/p>\n

President Donald Trump announced the strikes early on Saturday and said that Maduro and his wife are in U.S. custody. The attack marks a huge escalation of Trump\u2019s hostilities toward the Venezuelan government and raises questions about the\u00a0legal justification\u00a0for the operation. <\/p>\n

Several Democrats also called out Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who they said had told Congress that the administration did not intend to impose regime change in Venezuela. <\/p>\n

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Saturday he was \u201cshocked\u201d by the developments, especially after Trump administration officials assured him last month they were not seeking a regime change in Venezuela. He called the Trump administration\u2019s failure to notify Congress \u201can excuse for secrecy\u201d and \u201coutrageous and dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

House Minority Leader\u00a0Hakeem Jeffries issued a statement lambasting Trump and his top officials for not seeking congressional approval for the use of military force. And in a joint statement, Schumer and Jeffries called on the Trump administration to provide an immediate briefing to top Democratic and GOP leaders in the House and Senate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMaduro is an illegitimate ruler, but I have seen no evidence that his presidency poses a threat that would justify military action without Congressional authorization, nor have I heard a strategy for the day after and how we will prevent Venezuela from descending into chaos,\u201d said Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. \u201cSecretary Rubio repeatedly denied to Congress that the Administration intended to force regime change in Venezuela. The Administration must immediately brief Congress on its plan to ensure stability in the region and its legal justification for this decision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the attack \u201cis entirely inconsistent with what his cabinet repeatedly briefed to Congress\u201d and is counter to what the American public wants.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause the President and his Cabinet repeatedly denied any intention of conducting regime change in Venezuela when briefing Congress, we are left with no understanding of how the Administration is preparing to mitigate risks to the U.S. and we have no information regarding a long-term strategy following today\u2019s extraordinary escalation,\u201d Shaheen said. \u201cInstead, the Administration consistently misled the American people and their elected representatives by offering three differing and contradictory explanations for its actions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the administration\u2019s actions may set a dangerous precedent.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s plan to \u2018run\u2019 Venezuela for its oil is already facing problems<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIf the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan\u2019s leadership? What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting similar justification to abduct Ukraine\u2019s president?\u201d Warner said. \u201cOnce this line is crossed, the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse, and authoritarian regimes will be the first to exploit it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republicans, on the other hand, largely praised Trump for the attack. <\/p>\n

Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, hailed the operation as one that \u201cchanged the course of Latin America for a generation.\u201d Moreno, whose family immigrated to Florida from Colombia, also repeated the administration\u2019s claim that the war on Maduro was aimed at protecting Americans from narcoterrorism.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday\u2019s military action in Venezuela was a decisive and justified operation that will protect American lives,\u201d House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said about the attack. \u201cNicolas Maduro is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans after years of trafficking illegal drugs and violent cartel members into our country \u2014 crimes for which he\u2019s been properly indicted in U.S. courts and an arrest warrant duly issued \u2014 and today he learned what accountability looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republican lawmakers also defended the administration\u2019s actions and suggested that they were lawful, citing federal charges against Maduro. <\/p>\n

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the Venezuelan leader\u2019s capture was in \u201cexecution of a valid Department of Justice warrant.\u201d However, Thune appeared to acknowledge that the administration had not presented a post-Maduro strategy to senators, saying that he looked forward to \u201creceiving further briefings from the administration on this operation as part of its comprehensive counternarcotics strategy when the Senate returns to Washington next week.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were some voices of dissent from the GOP, however. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who had a high-profile break with Trump and who is set to depart Congress this month, questioned the administration\u2019s focus on Venezuela. She pointed to the outsized role of Mexican cartels in bringing illicit drugs into the U.S. and Trump\u2019s pardoning of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez who was convicted in a drug trafficking case.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmericans [sic] disgust with our own government\u2019s never ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we are forced to pay for it and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, always keep the Washington military machine funded and going,\u201d Greene said in a statement on X. \u201cThis is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy were we wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has backed legislation to curb Trump\u2019s hostilities against Venezuela, also questioned the constitutionality of the attack.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this action were constitutionally sound, the Attorney General wouldn\u2019t be tweeting that they\u2019ve arrested the President of a sovereign country and his wife for possessing guns in violation of a 1934 U.S. firearm law,\u201d Massie wrote on X, referring to the indictment against Maduro and his wife that accuses them of violating the National Firearms Act. <\/p>\n

Read more State Dept. tries to shield X from British probe into AI porn scandal<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Democrats and Republicans had largely opposing reactions to the operation, which Congress did not approve and reportedly had no prior knowledge about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\nDemocrats condemn Trump\u2019s Venezuela strikes as Republicans largely cheer Maduro\u2019s capture - Long Distance Movers USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=137\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Democrats condemn Trump\u2019s Venezuela strikes as Republicans largely cheer Maduro\u2019s capture - 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