Congressmen Michael Baumgartner, Adam Smith react after U.S. military attacks Venezuela, captures its president

WASHINGTON – Republican Michael Baumgartner and Democrat Adam Smith have traveled the world and worked together on U.S. foreign policy, but in interviews on Saturday, the two Washington congressmen expressed starkly different perspectives on the Trump administration’s strike on Venezuela that captured the country’s president and his wife.

The overnight operation, which President Donald Trump announced Saturday morning, involved more than 150 U.S. aircraft that knocked out Venezuelan air defenses and allowed a team of Army commandos to storm the compound where President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were sleeping. The couple was taken by boat and airplane to New York, where both will face drug-trafficking charges.

“I think it was a great step for the security of the American people and the Western Hemisphere, and certainly a great day for the people of Venezuela,” said Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “They deserve much better than the Maduro regime.”

The military action was conducted without authorization from Congress and came after months of U.S. strikes on boats off the Venezuelan coast that killed more than 100 alleged drug traffickers, as Trump has continued to push the traditional boundaries of executive power while the Republican-led House and Senate have largely supported the campaign. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to authorize wars, but few GOP lawmakers objected to the strike on Saturday, while Democrats denounced it as a violation of U.S. and international laws that could put American troops in harm’s way in another prolonged war, a possibility Trump didn’t rule out during a news conference.

Smith, a Democrat from Bellevue and the top member of his party on the House Armed Services Committee, traveled with Baumgartner to Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries in April and to China in September. He said that while Maduro is clearly not “a good guy,” the same could be said about Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and other former leaders the U.S. military ousted, only to set off years of increased violence and instability.

“As tempting as it is to say, ‘We’ve got this powerful U.S. military; we can just go in and fix this’ – it’s not as easy as it looks,” Smith said. “Trump is walking down the same path of using the U.S. military to try to reshape the world. And he had promised that he wasn’t going to do that.”

While critics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq accused then-President George W. Bush of toppling Hussein in part to control the country’s oil reserves, Trump has said openly that he’s motivated by giving U.S. companies access to Venezuela’s oil. In December, Trump pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras, who had been convicted of drug charges in the United States, undercutting the idea that the U.S. military needed to oust Maduro because of his alleged involvement in drug trafficking.

Baumgartner said Maduro’s regime poses a threat to Americans “first and foremost” because of its role in trafficking cocaine, which is largely produced in neighboring Colombia, to the United States. Violence connected to the drug trade, he added, has destabilized much of the Western Hemisphere.

“Just having an anti-American, communist, narco-terrorism, narco-trafficking regime so close to America – and one in such a resource-rich and potentially influential country – it just is not in America’s interest to allow that to continue,” he said.

Smith said Venezuela clearly posed “no imminent threat to the U.S.,” and he rejected the idea that ousting Maduro would have a significant effect on the drug trade.

“The drug trade existed and flourished long before Maduro came along, and it will likely exist and flourish long after he is gone,” he said. “Maduro is an illegitimately elected president who was running the country poorly. Get in line. There’s a lot of people doing that. The only claim that this was connected to us is that somehow that was driving the drug problem in the U.S., and that’s ridiculous.”

Maduro came to power as the hand-picked successor to former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, after Chavez died in 2013. Subsequent Venezuelan elections in 2019 and 2024 were marred by allegations of vote-rigging, and dozens of protesters were killed following each election.

Baumgartner said removing Maduro from power serves U.S. interests in other ways, including by potentially weakening the influence of Cuba, the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah, Russia and China.

“We’d like all of our neighbors to have good relations with America – it’s in our interest to have that – but particularly a near neighbor that has the world’s largest reserve of oil and one that has a lot of strategic assets should be,” he said.

“The Cubans continue to be very adversarial to America, and there were essentially Cuban special agents running large parts of the Venezuelan regime. And that opens Venezuela up to Hezbollah from Iran being there, and certainly a lot of Russian military assets involved in it. And then the fact that Venezuela was supplying cheap oil to China gives them some strategic leverage.”

Baumgartner added that Venezuelan immigrants to the United States have destabilized the country and brought criminal groups, such as the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“I think there were over 7 million Venezuelans that had fled to the U.S. during the Maduro regime,” he said. “Those uncontrolled immigration inflows cause a lot of destabilization, and certainly they can bring the criminal network with it as well.”

An estimated 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country since Maduro came to power in 2013. About 770,000 of them had come to the United States as of 2023, according to the Migration Policy Center, and other estimates suggest as many as 1 million Venezuelans had entered the country.

Smith, who as a leader of the Armed Services Committee typically receives vital information from the executive branch before other members of Congress, said he and other committee leaders were not briefed on the operation beforehand.

“We did not know it was coming,” he said. “They’re justifying it by saying it was a Justice Department action that the military was just supporting.”

Baumgartner said he also wasn’t informed of the strike ahead of time, but he said congressional leaders “had a pretty good understanding that there was a high probability that the U.S. would be taking action against Maduro.”

In October, Baumgartner told The Spokesman-Review that although he supported the Trump administration’s strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, “there has to be congressional oversight and authorization in these major foreign policy actions.”

On Saturday, the Spokane lawmaker said that while “there is some tension within the Constitution,” it isn’t practical or realistic to expect a president to wait for Congress to authorize a war before taking military action. Ever since then-President Thomas Jefferson sent the U.S. Navy to the Mediterranean to confront the Barbary Pirates in 1801, he said, every American president has “essentially looked at the Constitution and fulfilled their role as commander-in-chief as they’ve seen fit.”

Presidents Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump have all launched strikes in numerous countries under the auspices of a broad war authorization Congress passed in 2001 after the 9/11 terror attacks. Baumgartner supported the Trump administration’s strikes in Iran and on Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen in 2025, but on Saturday he said it was “pretty nebulous to suggest that the strikes on the Houthis were part of that vote” that authorized a broad war on Islamist terrorism 24 years ago.

Asked if he believes the operation in Venezuela required congressional approval, Baumgartner said that isn’t “the bigger question.” He added that members of Congress should “essentially exert out power and our influence through the budgetary process,” and that individual lawmakers should “get educated and understand these issues, and not just sit on the sidelines and complain.”

“What I’m arguing is that Congress’ real power is not in an authorization,” Baumgartner said. “Congress’ real power is in the budgetary process, in terms of what we fund. And speaking for myself, I am confident in the administration’s plan and support the action they have taken.”

The Eastern Washington Republican suggested that Democrats who voted in December to pass the annual bill that funds the U.S. military should have understood what the Trump administration was preparing to do, because it had stationed the world’s biggest aircraft carrier in the region and had been destroying boats for months. That defense authorization bill did not include an authorization of war against Venezuela, but did include measures intended to force the Pentagon to release more information about the boat strikes.

“Congress’ real role, effectively, for the last 250 years, has been the power of the purse,” Baumgartner said. “I think sometimes there’s either willing ignorance or laziness by some members of Congress, not to get educated and understand these issues. We’ve had our largest aircraft carrier parked off the coast of Venezuela, and President Trump has been quite transparent in the last three months about what’s going on with Maduro.”

In recent months, Trump has issued vague threats toward Maduro but never said publicly that the United States would attack the country unless its president stepped down. Baumgartner said the U.S. president was clear that his administration was “going to do what needed to be done to get Maduro out of Venezuela.”

Smith said Congress could theoretically cut off funding for U.S. military operations or “speak out publicly” against the administration’s actions in Venezuela, but the legislature’s power is limited so long as GOP lawmakers continue to cede their authority to the president.

“The Republicans have decided to basically dissolve the United States Congress,” he said. “The Republican Party has said, ‘I pledge allegiance to Donald Trump,’ not ‘I pledge allegiance to the Constitution.’ They’ve made that very clear, that what Trump wants he gets. Beyond what you may think about the decision to remove Maduro in this manner, it is a concentration of power in the executive. It is a shifting away from a constitutional republic and towards an authoritarian government.”

Smith said the Trump administration doesn’t have a plan for what comes next in Venezuela, pointing out that the country’s vice president, other senior government officials and gang leaders all remain in power.

“We have absolutely no control over any of it, and he just thinks we’re going to run Venezuela for a while,” the Democrat said, referring to what Trump told reporters on Saturday. “They have absolutely no idea what comes next.”

Smith said he suspects that the Trump administration’s ideal outcome would be U.S. companies controlling Venezuela’s vast oil reserves while drug traffickers continue to operate, because disrupting that illicit commerce would take too many American boots on the ground.

“We knew a hell of a lot more about what it would take to run Iraq after Saddam Hussein left, and that didn’t work out,” he said. “Here, there seems to be no evidence whatsoever that there is a military plan for answering that question.”

Baumgartner dismissed the comparison to Iraq and Afghanistan, saying he has total confidence in Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom he said “was really made for this moment.”

“What the Bush administration and then the Obama administration attempted to do in Afghanistan was go to the most remote, culturally backwards country on Earth and drain the threat of Islamic extremism by installing a prototype western democracy,” said Baumgartner, who worked in Afghanistan as a U.S. government contractor and in Iraq as a State Department employee during the wars.

Iraq was more strategically important than Afghanistan, he said, but it was difficult to install an effective government after ousting Hussein because of its history of ethnic tension, and because “it was a people with a culture and religion that was not compatible with the West, whereas Venezuela is right next door. It has a history of shared culture with the United States.”

“I have a lot of confidence in Secretary Rubio,” Baumgartner said. “I’m very confident that there is a plan for what comes next, and I will continue as a member of Congress to work on my due diligence and communications with the administration and folks in the region and otherwise, to understand more. And we’ll look forward to that being presented by the administration.”

Smith said the attack on Venezuela could harm U.S. interests around the globe, further eroding the international order that made the United States a superpower, by giving Chinese Premier Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin license to invade countries they want to control, such as Taiwan and Ukraine.

“It gives them a powerful argument that they are legally empowered to overturn whatever regime they want to overturn,” he said. “I’m not naive here. It’s not like if we hadn’t done this, Putin and Xi would play fair, but it certainly undermines any effort to build international coalitions to help prevent those things from happening.”

Smith said Trump has clearly also decided that he can do the same thing in other countries, including Cuba. The congressman pointed to the National Security Strategy document the administration released in November, which lays out a vision of U.S. domination of the Western Hemisphere.

“This incredible thing last night,” Trump told Fox News on Saturday. “We have to do it again. We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us.”

Baumgartner said he was in the Dominican Republic in November with Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and met with the country’s president.

“He made it very clear that they were very supportive of U.S. activities in the Caribbean,” he said of Dominican President Luis Abinader. “I asked him point-blank about Venezuela, and he said, ‘We’ve always been very supportive of democracy in Venezuela.’”

Smith said he knows there are problems in the world, “But the lesson we should have learned is that U.S. military force has a very mixed to bad record of being able to solve those problems and make things better.”

Baumgartner said that when Trump was running for president in 2016, “I was really skeptical of his foreign-policy acumen. But what Trump has shown is that he just doesn’t accept the status quo for long-term foreign policy challenges. He just looks at what is in the U.S. interest and really works hard to achieve that outcome.”

“Oftentimes in foreign policy, it’s not a choice between good and bad; it’s a choice between bad and worse,” Baumgartner said. “But with Venezuela, this is a positive strategic move for the U.S., and I think there’s a lot of reason to be confident in the administration moving forward.”