Removal of the Use of United States Forces for Hostilities Within or Against Venezuela
Floor Speech
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Mr. FINE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding me time.
My friend, the chairman, referred to stupidity in debating this resolution. I would like to talk about hypocrisy and illiteracy. Ten days before Joe Biden left office, he raised the bounty on Nicolas Maduro to $25 million. Now, I don't know if my Democratic colleagues thought that he would go: Wow, $25 million, maybe I should just turn myself in.
I would like to believe that when they put that bounty out there they actually believed he should be removed from office.
There is an old Twitter post from President Biden that said: ``Trump talks tough on Venezuela, but admires thugs and dictators like Nicolas Maduro.''
Guess what, Mr. Speaker.
I think President Trump showed in actions, not words, that he was determined to remove a drug lord, and that is what Nicolas Maduro was, from power.
The President doesn't have to let us know every time they go and arrest somebody who has broken the law. That is exactly what happened here.
Now I want to talk about illiteracy. My friend, the chairman, talked about people not understanding what is in the resolution. Before I got to Congress, I used to complain about really long bills that no one read before they voted on them. Well, this one is six lines long, and it doesn't talk about things like my colleague spoke about like escalation. This resolution deals with escalation.
That is not what it does. It is six lines, and two of them say this: ``Congress hereby directs the President to remove United States Armed Forces from Venezuela . . . ''
There aren't any there.
They proposed to have us vote on something that is irrelevant because the action they want to stop is not taking place. There is no war there now.
I think what my colleagues are is shell-shocked because after all of these years of empty comments condemning Maduro, empty statements by them, empty statements by Joe Biden talking about how bad of a man he was, we finally have a President who actually went and did something about it.
That is what President Trump did. We should be proud. We should be thanking him. We should be supporting him for what he did, and we should be voting down this resolution.
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