TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — Arizona leaders' reaction to the Venezuela operation split along party lines.
The action against Venezuela is something no member of Congress can afford not to comment on. Comments from Representatives for Southern Arizona ranged from praise, to concern about what happened and what happens next.
Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego says, “It's disappointing and scary. We are violating the Constitution of the United States. We are engaging in war without permission of Congress, and clearly the Republicans and Donald Trump have no concept of what they're actually doing.”
Gallego looks at what happened in Venezuela through the eyes of a Senator and the eyes of a Marine veteran who served in Iraq as the US tried to control that country. Now he's hearing an American President say the United States will run Venezuela.
“There's been no plan, no explanation how this ends at the end of the day, and how we're all going to end up being in a stable situation. All we know right now is that somebody is in charge of Venezuela from what it looks like right now, it's basically the same people that were in charge before. Maduro is gone, but all his regime people are still in and so we're not any better.”
Republican Congressman Juan Ciscomani praised what he sees as an administration that is disrupting a country aligned with dangerous adversaries like Iran, China, Hezbollah and Hamas.
He said in part: “American service members carried out a decisive operation aimed at disrupting a narco-terror regime responsible for years of harm to the United States. Nicolas Maduro and the criminal network he leads have fueled the flow of illegal drugs into the United States costing countless American lives.”
Democratic Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva called the Venezuela operation “reckless, unconstitutional and deeply destabilizing.”
She says it’s about power and oil and says “We have seen this playbook before in Latin America and elsewhere, and we have paid the price for it—through endless conflict and regional instability leading to increased forced migration and humanitarian needs.”
Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and the other Arizona Democrats all say the Constitution requires President Trump to get permission from Congress to go to war.
Kelly says the move on Venezuela is about taking over its oil reserves. The Senator says Madura is “a brutal, illegitimate dictator” and Kelly wants the Venezuelan people to choose their own future, but he says “...if we learned anything from the Iraq war it’s that dropping bombs or toppling a leader doesn’t guarantee democracy, stability to make Americans safer. More often it leads to chaos and drags the US into a war and lengthy occupation. He says, “I don’t trust that this administration has a plan,timeline or price tag for what comes next.”
