Gregory Meeks: “Just on that point, because, I think it is important, on the whole western hemisphere because the first statement that…”

“Just on that point, because, I think it is important, on the whole western hemisphere because the first statement that we heard from President Chavez from Venezuela is indicating that Venezuela is not Haiti. Because just in April of 2003, there was an attempted coup there, again, threatening democracy; and we stood idly by. And but for the people of Venezuela who decided that they were not going to allow the coup to stand and put the president back, we were silent on that. Our hands were kind of caught, the administration's hands I should say, because the gentleman is correct. I do not think the Congress would have acted that way, but the administration's hand was caught in a cookie jar. Here we come just a few months, we move from that, and we have the same kind of coup. There is a lot of similarities in that, whereas we seem to disregard the institution of democracy because of the dislike of who happens to be the democratically elected president. What we should be doing is looking to see how we can strengthen those institutions of democracy, how we can be helpful to strengthen those institutions as opposed to saying that the way you do that is to have a coup d'etat which gets rid of government altogether and causes mayhem.”