“We don’t anticipate boots on the ground,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said, as some senators aim to force a vote this week on a measure requiring congressional approval for any follow-up hostilities.
Lawmakers who attended classified briefings with Trump administration officials on Wednesday said they do not expect to see troops on the ground in Venezuela though the deployment of troops in the region will continue indefinitely.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R- La., described the U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as a one-off military operation and said the closed-door meetings with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not indicate further troop involvement.
“We don’t anticipate boots on the ground,” Johnson said. “That is not the administration’s objective, it is not their expectation and I think that sentiment is shared by everybody in the auditorium today. We don’t anticipate that’s going to be necessary.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., also said it is unlikely to see troops deployed to Venezuela. Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., said there were no boots on the ground “right now” but the U.S. has contingency plans around the world “just in case something does happen.”
President Donald Trump has said he is prepared to send American service members into Venezuela if interim President Delcy Rodriguez stops cooperating with the U.S. and threatened a second strike “if they don’t behave.”
About 15,000 troops and a dozen warships are deployed in the Caribbean, and lawmakers on Wednesday said administration officials did not give any indication of how long they will be there.
Hegseth told reporters after a briefing with senators that “leverage” provided by the American military, including the seizure Wednesday of two oil tankers as part of the administration’s blockade of Venezuelan oil exports, will continue to be used.
“Our military is prepared to continue this,” he said. “We are an administration of action to advance our interests and that is on full display.”
He dismissed questions about how much the military activity around Venezuela will cost taxpayers, arguing that such questions were rarely asked when the military was operating in regions such as the Middle East.
Senators seeking to claw back Congress’s authority to declare war said they were alarmed by the escalating campaign in South America and will force a vote this week on a measure requiring congressional approval for any follow-up hostilities against Venezuela.
The measure — led by Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Rand Paul, R-Ky. — is the latest effort by lawmakers to rein in military actions that they believe violate the Constitution and put military personnel at risk. Previous war powers resolutions concerning Venezuela have failed in both the Senate and House.
Kaine and other Democrats said it was time for the Trump administration to come before congressional committees for public hearings on Venezuela rather than continue to hold closed-door meetings on Capitol Hill that bound lawmakers to secrecy.
“We are four months into a sustained military operation, more than 200 ‘enemies’ have been killed, American troops have been injured, we have the U.S. forces arrayed around Venezuela but neither the House nor the Senate have been willing to hold single public hearing to put these facts before the public,” Kaine said. “Why not? We need to start doing our job.”
- Security