Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the Environmental Protection Agency Relating to ``Air Plan Approval; South Dakota;

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, Donald Trump has taken us back to the era of gunboat diplomacy over the last 4 months, back to that era when a powerful nation would station its gunships off the coast of another nation in order to compel them to do what we wanted to enable us to have access to their resources, to force them to enable our corporations to take over their economy. It is a deeply powerfully resented strategy for nations to say: Hey, that militarily powerful other nation came and threatened us with their gunboats in order to take our resources and profit the more powerful nation--gunboat diplomacy. And yet here we are.

This is hot off the press from CNN. Two senior White House officials told the CNN reporters: ``During conversations led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Trump administration told Venezuela's interim president Delcy Rodriguez that the country must cut ties with China, Iran, Russia and Cuba, and agree to partner exclusively with the US on oil production.'' And that ``Rodriguez,'' the Acting President, of Venezuela, ``must also agree to favor the Trump administration and US oil companies for future oil sales.''

Gunboats off the coast. Threats to say we will keep grabbing your oil tankers to prevent you from selling your resource on the international market unless we, the United States, take control of your oil. Sorry, Venezuela.

Well, this certainly wasn't about the future of a better Venezuela for Venezuelans. You know, just 18 months ago, the people of Venezuela voted in a Presidential election, and they voted for a man named Gonzalez, who was a stand-in for the champion of democracy, Maria Machado, who just received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work. They voted, according to the estimates of monitors, about a ratio of 2 to 1--2 to 1--for democracy.

No, Venezuela is no stranger to democracy. They had a democracy for three decades, and they lost it to the internal corrosion of the separation of powers and the checks and balances of a democracy. And certainly that led to the current tyranny, the authoritarian state that they live in now.

But did the Trump administration say: We want to help Venezuelans reclaim their country? No. They said: We like dictatorships. We just want a pliable dictatorship. So they said: We are leaving in place this entire structure of corrupted military and government officials with massive corruption, and yet we will have a new Acting President, who has assured us that she will do what we want.

And what do we want? We want your oil. We want it under the control only of U.S. corporations.

That is hardly a message that helps the United States in our standing or our interests in the world. First of all, it produces enormous hostility from countries that faced that type of coercion in the past. They well remember the United States using its economic might, its military might, to try to exploit their resources through our U.S. corporations. So it undermines our collaboration around the world.

You know a second thing it does, it undermines the respect we are held in--or used to be held in--for advancing the vision of democracy, of government by and for the people, kind of the light that we brought to the world to say: The world shouldn't be in a situation where citizens are ruled by powerful people for their own gain. No, they should be able to make their own decisions for their own future, for their own better future.

But you didn't hear any discussion about honoring the will of the Venezuelan people who voted 18 months ago, 2 to 1, for democracy.

So now we are looking at a situation where we see other challenges that flow from this, this continuation of a dictatorship by Delcy Rodriguez, the Vice President, who Secretary Rubio has said is more pliable, more manipulatable, will more service our interest than the predecessor, and yet all the corruption of that authoritarian government, all of the repression left fully in place.

President Trump said:

If she doesn't do what's right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.

Leave the dictatorship in place. Put a person in charge we think is more going to bend to our pressure, and threaten her--the President of the United States threatened her with something worse than what he did to Maduro.

Trump's goal is clear: He doesn't mind if there is a dictatorship, as long as it is our dictatorship, serving us, the American corporations, and the Trump administration, rather than the Venezuelan people.

The people of Venezuela deserve free and fair elections.

And then let's talk about how this entire setup for this gunboat diplomacy was based on a massive lie to the American people. The Trump administration said: This is about stopping drugs coming into the United States that have done so much damage to our families.

Well, we are all very sympathetic to stopping every bit of drugs that come into our country. We have cocaine. We have fentanyl. We have meth.

But here is the story: On the Venezuelan exports of cocaine, expert after expert says, overwhelmingly, that is the path of drugs to Europe, not the United States.

And then the Trump administration said: But--wait, wait, wait--there must be fentanyl down in Venezuela. We are stopping fentanyl from coming into the United States.

But that, too, was another lie. The fentanyl comes from Mexico. It comes across our southern border. It is made with precursors from China. We are pressing China to end their distribution or their importation or exportation of those precursors into Mexico, and we are working with the Mexican Government to stop the flow into the United States, doing everything we can to find those places where the fentanyl is made. We need to stop fentanyl in every possible way, but Venezuela is not the source of the fentanyl problem.

I think about how it was the case with George W. Bush that he created a fake story about weapons of mass destruction to lead us into a massive regime-change strategy and nation-building strategy in Iraq. Huge amounts of American treasure and lives paid the price. Four thousand U.S. servicemembers died, and $2 trillion of our American treasure that could have built our schools, could have built our healthcare system, could have built our infrastructure was wasted because of a big lie told to the American people.

And now we have the Trump administration with this big lie that this was about drugs, when it turns out that it is about regime change and it is about oil.

What bothers me is a lot, but it is the fact that the administration directly lied to the American people and lied in the classified hearings that they held up here on Capitol Hill, saying: Nope, no plans for regime change.

Well, it turns out those plans had been developing over a very significant period of time.

So if it was about drugs, by the way, the President wouldn't have pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, a drug kingpin, right in the middle of the process of saying he is trying to stop drugs. Here is a guy who was sitting in our prison because he was the architect of a cocaine superhighway into the United States of America, delivering an estimated 400 tons of cocaine, devastating hundreds of thousands of American families, and Trump busted him out of prison while he was saying he was absolutely trying to stop drugs. You don't send a message about stopping drugs by taking a kingpin and setting him free, and yet that is exactly--exactly--what happened.

And then we have this issue of the administration saying: Hey, this isn't a military operation--no, no, no. It is a judicial operation.

If it is a judicial operation, then what we are talking about is an American indictment supported by an extraterritorial rendition, a fancy term for going abroad and kidnapping the person whom we have an indictment on.

Is that a principle that we abide by in the law? Are we saying: Hey, Canada, if you have an indictment, come to the United States of America and grab an American citizen. We are fine with that.

I say: Hell, no. We don't want any country coming to the United States of America and grabbing people off our streets, and yet that is the principle that Donald Trump just promoted and exemplified to the world: We are going to go kidnap somebody we have an indictment for.

And if it was about an indictment, then it would have ended the moment that he was on the plane being brought to the United States. But it doesn't end--does it?--because we are hearing from the administration that it is about us now running Venezuela.

Obviously, this was a military operation--a military operation not in support of an indictment; a military operation in support of a regime change and in support of taking oil.

That is why my colleague from Virginia is bringing forth the War Powers Resolution--because if it is a military operation, it should go through Congress because our Constitution says so.

If we go back to how the Founders viewed this situation, we can turn to James Madison, who wrote to Thomas Jefferson and said:

The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly, with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.

That is our Constitution--vested in the legislature because issues of war and peace should never be entrusted to one person. It is too tempting. That is why our Founders put it in the responsibility of this Congress.

So to my colleague from Virginia, thank you for bringing forth this War Powers Resolution.

Under the leadership of the last year, the House and the Senate have failed their article I responsibilities in three very significant ways. First of all, they have not defended the power of the purse placed here with Congress, not the President. Every time the President shuts down a program and says, ``It is authorized, it is funded, but I am ending it because it doesn't align with the priorities of the administration,'' that is an authoritarian statement, breaking our Constitution, and all 100 Senators should be down here on the floor and saying: Hell, no.

We failed.

Second is in oversight. It has now been 4 months that the administration has been preparing their war plan, striking ships in the Eastern Pacific, striking boats in the Caribbean. Not a single oversight hearing--not one. That is our responsibility, and we failed it.

And now we are failing on the third key provision, which is that it is Congress that carries the responsibility for declaring war or authorizing war, not the President.

So this week, due to the resolution being brought forth by my colleague from Virginia Senator Kaine, we have a chance--all 100 of us--to weigh in and correct this failure on this third point and reclaim the responsibilities that we took on when we took the oath of office to become a U.S. Senator. That is our responsibility.

This should pass overwhelmingly to tell the President: no more military action in Venezuela unless Congress provides an authorization for the use of military force.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source