After Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union (SOTU) address in 2020, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) absolutely shredded him on the floor of the Senate for failing to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from power.
Now, Schumer is flipping, blasting Trump for making a move against Maduro, having arrested him over the weekend.
Schumer is now saying that what Trump ordered was illegal, but there is, however, precedent for such an arrest.
Schumer lit Trump up after the aforementioned SOTU address, stating, "Maybe his best metaphor was his claim to bring democracy to Venezuela. There’s a big policy there. It flopped.”
He continued, "The president brags about his Venezuela policy? Give us a break. He hasn’t brought an end to the Maduro regime.”
Schumer then stated, “The Maduro regime is more powerful today and more entrenched today than it was when the president began his anti-Maduro. Same thing with North Korea, same thing with China, same thing with Russia. Same thing with Syria."
With those comments, one would think that the Democrat senator would have supported Maduro’s arrest this weekend, but that was not the case.
Schumer, as did most Democrats, went ballistic after Maduro was arrested.
He stated, “Maduro is a horrible, horrible person, but you don’t treat lawlessness with other lawlessness, and that’s what’s happened here.”
The lawmaker added, “They did not just do ships off the water. They went inside Venezuela, bombed civilian as well as military places, and it’s a violation of the law to do what they did without getting the authorization of Congress.”
Legally, Trump's actions fall into a grey area, but they are not unprecedented. The most relevant precedent would be the arrest of Manuel Noriega in January 1990, with the dictator later indicted in Miami.
You are going to hear people on both sides argue their case, but as we noted above, there is a precedent in place on this.
Milena Sterio, an expert on international criminal law at Cleveland State University College of Law, stated, "A country cannot go into another foreign country and arrest people. If the US wants to arrest someone in another country, the proper way to do that is extradition."
Attorney General Pam Bondi says otherwise, stating, "The mission was conducted to support an ongoing criminal prosecution tied to large-scale narcotics trafficking and related offenses that have fueled violence, destabilized the region, and contributed directly to the drug crisis claiming American lives.”
All things being equal, I believe the arrest will hold, but there is a small caveat to that. Trump could not help but spout off to the media about how he informed oil companies about the move both before and after the arrest. He has also made it sound like the mission was to facilitate regime change rather than an outright arrest. For appearances (and legal) sake, he should have kept his mouth shut because Trump’s hubris in this matter could wind up giving Maduro the legal out that he needs.
