Jen Kiggans and Ben Cline, in remarks on Venezuela released by their respective offices on Saturday, appear to be unaware that they’re about to be gerrymandered into leans-D congressional districts.
“I am grateful that our adversaries have once again been reminded of what American strength and resolve look like on the world stage,” said Kiggans, a second-term U.S. House Republican representing the Second District, based down in Hampton Roads, commenting on the U.S. military coup in Venezuela that removed that country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, from office and from the country in the early-morning hours on Saturday.
Cline’s take:
“Protecting our people, securing our border, and dismantling drug trafficking networks is non-negotiable. We will use every lawful tool available to stop this crisis, hold those responsible accountable, defend our sovereignty, and keep American families safe,” said Cline, a lame duck walking in the Sixth District, which for now runs along a lengthy stretch of the Interstate 81 corridor west of the Blue Ridge.
Yeah, this ought to go over well, for both.
Those are the kinds of statements you’d expect from MAGAs in safe-R districts.
ICYMI
Donald Trump signaled at a late-morning news conference that the U.S. “will be running” Venezuela until he chooses a successor to Maduro, putting the lie to claims by his underlings that the operation was about having Maduro face charges from a new indictment on drug and weapons charges that adds to charges against Maduro and other Venezuelan officials announced in 2020 during the first Trump administration.
It is flouting international law, at the least, for Trump, as the U.S. president, to think, much less assert, that he gets to choose a successor to the president of another country after initiating a military overthrow; in the case of Venezuela, it has its own system of laws, and the successor would be the vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, who, in a speech on state TV in Venezuela on Saturday, termed the capture and removal of Maduro from Venezuelan soil “barbaric” and an “illegal and illegitimate kidnapping.”
“If there is one thing that the Venezuelan people and this country are very clear about, it is that we will never again be slaves, that we will never again be a colony of any empire, of whatever stripe,” Rodriguez said.
Cue the drumbeat to war, which won’t go as well as Stephen Miller seems to think it will.
It’s one thing to bomb randos on fishing boats, another to pacify a country of 30 million with a military of 300,000 and rugged territory for outsiders to have to navigate.
Kiggans, in her statement on the U.S. military coup, made it all about the “strength of the United States,” and how the “United States will not tolerate illegal drug trafficking that targets our nation and harms our people.”
“For too long, Americans have suffered the consequences of poisonous drugs funneled into our country by this illegal regime, and this operation marks a concrete step toward putting an end to that threat. Every parent in Virginia and across the country should rejoice that narcoterrorism is being addressed to protect our children and their futures against the deadly flow of drugs into our communities,” Kiggans said.
What, then, should we make of the pardon issued by Trump for the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in the U.S. in 2024 for conspiring to traffic more than 400 tons of cocaine and on weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison?
ICYMI
Trump granted the pardon to Hernández on Nov. 29, justifying that move by claiming Hernández was, “according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly” – though there is an uncomfortable fact with the Hernández case for Trump, in that the investigation into Hernández was initiated in 2015, and led by Emil Bove, a Justice Department prosecutor who later became Trump’s personal lawyer, and was appointed last year to a federal judgeship by Trump.
Hernández was found guilty on charges that he helped move more than 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. in exchange for millions in bribes from major traffickers, among them Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
I haven’t seen anything from either Kiggans or Cline on the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández.
Because of course they won’t comment on how Trump gave the one guy a pardon because his people paid for the access needed to get one, and how the other guy is now in jail because he wouldn’t play ball.
No comment from either of our lame-duck MAGAs in Congress on how Trump is egging China, a key trade partner of Venezuela, into, you know, something; a cold war, maybe, if we’re lucky, that’s all it would be.
At the least, Trump just dragged us into sending hundreds of thousands of troops to Venezuela to restore and then maintain order there, for years into the future.
And we thought Iraq and Afghanistan, which dragged on for 20 years, were bad.
They’re on the other side of the world; Venezuela is just down the street from Florida.
Video: The latest on Venezuela
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Chris Graham
