Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Saturday urged Republicans skeptical of President Donald Trump’s move to oust Venezuela’s president to back legislation placing more limits on executive power.
The Senate’s most powerful Democrat said during a press call that several GOP committee chairs have privately expressed concern to top Democrats sitting on their panels over Trump’s decision to authorize an extraordinary military operation that captured Nicolas Maduro overnight.
“Maduro is an illegitimate dictator, but launching military action without congressional authorization, without a credible plan, but what comes next is reckless,” Schumer said.
Schumer pressed troubled Republicans to back the passage of the bipartisan War Powers Resolution, which he introduced alongside Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and other lawmakers last month. The resolution will be brought to the Senate floor for debate next week, Schumer promised, telling reporters “we’re going to be pushing our Republican colleagues to stand up for the American people to get this done.”
“We have heard from some Republicans in private conversations, chairs, talking to their ranking members, that they have some — they are troubled by this,” Schumer said, adding that he’s in talks with ranking Democrats on relevant committees on how to respond to the administration’s action against Maduro.
“You’ll be hearing more from them in the coming days. I’ve talked to a bunch of them today. They’ve already had some discussions with their chairs,” he continued. “Congress should not be sidelined as the Trump administration gets sucked into another nation-building quagmire, and we’re going to hold them accountable.”
Schumer said congressional leadership did not receive advance notification about the administration’s decision to authorize land strikes against Venezuela and depose Maduro.
He said “the Gang of Eight,” which is composed of the top Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate and House and the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, “immediately” requested a briefing from White House to the “entire” Congress on the Venezuela operation, but has not yet received a response from the administration.
“It’s been sort of a dark screen,” Schumer said. “We want to know the administration’s objectives, its plans to prevent a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster that plunges us into another endless war, or one that trades one corrupt dictator for another…. [But] they have not given us any details about what happened and haven’t gotten back to us on whether they’ve agreed to our request.”
Schumer again appealed to Republicans when pressed on whether he might use Trump’s Maduro ouster as grounds to press for the president’s impeachment should Democrats take the congressional majority back next year.
“We hope that we can have support from our Republican colleagues to put a break on this long before it gets that far,” he deflected.
Schumer’s comments come as, aside from reliable foreign policy hawks such as Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Republicans have appeared to broadly back Maduro’s stunning capture, at least in public statements.
Still, leading GOP lawmakers have signaled they have questions for the administration, leaving Schumer an opening to target Trump.
“I spoke to Secretary Rubio early this morning, and I look forward to receiving further briefings from the administration on this operation as part of its comprehensive counternarcotics strategy when the Senate returns to Washington next week,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) wrote in a statement.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, added concerns that “Russia will use this to justify their illegal and barbaric military actions against Ukraine, or China to justify an invasion of Taiwan.”
“Freedom and rule of law were defended last night, but dictators will try to exploit this to rationalize their selfish objectives,” he said.
The administration has defended the legality of its actions by seeking to use Article II of the Constitution to justify the attack, which states the president is the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military.
And officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio have framed the mission to arrest Maduro and bring him back to the U.S. for a trial as a law enforcement operation, rather than an act of war against Venezuela. Maduro faced an indictment unsealed Saturday from the Justice Department related to charges of narco-terrorism, similar to a 2020 indictment filed in New York.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Saturday defended the administration for not providing Congress with an earlier notification of the operation.
“That’s probably one reason it didn’t leak over these four days as they were waiting for the right weather,” Cotton told Fox News. “Congress isn’t notified when the FBI is going to arrest a drug trafficker or cyber criminal here in the United States, nor should Congress be notified when the executive branch is executing arrests on indicted persons.”
VENEZUELA’S NEW PRESIDENT COOPERATING WITH TRUMP AFTER MADURO’S CAPTURE
Schumer derided Trump for defending his decision not to brief Congress based on the argument that lawmakers would likely have leaked the top-secret operation to the media. He suggested the “secretive” move deliberately undermined limits on executive power set in place by the War Powers Act of 1973, keeping the Gang of Eight and other lawmakers in the dark.
“It’s an excuse for secrecy,” the Senate Democrat said. “One of the reasons we have hearings, we have consultation with Congress, is so that, and one of the reasons the founding fathers gave … the ability to declare war to the Congress, so there would be debate, discussion, different points of view, before something so momentous happens. And they’re just ripping up that part of the Constitution.”
