Monday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) said President Donald Trump’s military strikes in Venezuela were “illegal and extrajudicial.”
Host Jim Sciutto said, “The president acknowledged that the U.S. carried out some sort of military operation or kinetic operation in Venezuela. Is the U.S. marching towards war against Venezuela, in your view?”
Auchincloss said, “Could be, if Congress doesn’t stop it, which is why I co-led legislation that would refuse to provide any funding for operations in Venezuela absent congressional authorization. Let me be blunt: what the president is doing is illegal and extrajudicial. He does not have the authority to be launching these strikes. This is a made-up claim of a non-international armed conflict with narco traffickers, while at the same time, he’s pardoning the region’s biggest narco traffickers. This ain’t about drugs. It’s about oil. And he does not have congressional authority to wage a campaign of blood for oil. The reason he doesn’t have that congressional authorization is that no member of Congress, in their right mind, would vote for that, because the American public remembered what happened in Iraq 20 years ago when the last Republican president did blood for oil. We’re not doing it again. He is marching us closer and closer to land operations in the jungles of South America. That will be horrendous for the American service members who have to wage them.”
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