Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich proves herself to be just as big of a flack as the rest of the anchors on her network. Sen. Tim Kaine made an appearance on this weekend’s The Sunday Briefing, and was asked about something MO Sen. Eric Schmitt (who was on just before Kaine) said, which is the administration’s line that attacking Venezuela and the capture of its president and his wife wasn’t really an act of war, but some sort of legal action that was supposedly sanctioned by the courts.
Kaine proceeded to dismantle that talking point, much to Heinrich’s dismay.
HEINRICH: But to Senator Schmitt’s point, you how is this an act of war if the administration was, you know, executing an arrest warrant? The government is functioning. There is a vice president that’s just been sworn in to his point, and, you know, the U.S. military, Marco Rubio said there’s no expectation that there will be any additional action, that, you know, what the military did was in support of, you know, exercising the arrest warrant and executing that.
KAINE: Dropping bombs, authorizing covert operations, sending in the military, deposing the government, standing at a press conference and saying, we’re now going to run Venezuela. And when asked, who does that mean, we’re going to run Venezuela, the president pointed over his shoulder to the Secretary of Defense and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State.
To say this isn’t a military action that calls for a congressional response — and many of my colleagues want to avoid voting if at all possible. But to say this isn’t a military action that requires congressional authorization I think is to put your head in the sand.
HEINRICH: Well, there is…
KAINE: And frankly it follows… It well… there sure is. The United States has invaded many countries in Latin America for decades and the doctrine that President Trump is now using, this Monroe doctrine, was a doctrine that said the U.S. had the free rein to interfere militarily in the political affairs of nations in the Americas.
And what did that get us, Jacqui? It got us hostility in a region where we should be more connected with our neighbors, and it led many, many times to gross abuses of populations by dictators that the U.S. helped install.
Our history is not a good one here. We should learn something from it.
We should, but we won’t, just as too many have apparently learned nothing from Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
