Sec. 2. Findings; sense of Congress
400 words·~2 min read·
/bill/117/hr/7207/ih/section-2·A research copy — for the controlling text, always check the official state or federal source. Not legal advice.
Congress finds the following: From 1959 to 1999, Venezuela, officially known as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, had a form of government that embraced democratic principles. In 1999, Hugo Chávez was elected as the President of Venezuela, where he maintained power by redistributing the country’s vast oil reserves towards social welfare programs, suppressing dissent and independent media, and corrupting Venezuela’s democratic institutions, while simultaneously nationalizing the country’s private businesses, which he did so until his death on March 5, 2013.
On April 24, 2013, Nicolás Maduro became President of Venezuela, notwithstanding multiple claims of election fraud and constitutional violations against Maduro. During this time, Venezuela’s economy had become strongly dependent on the exportation of oil, with crude accounting for 86 percent of its exports. However, in 2014, Venezuela entered into an economic recession, which led to the Venezuelan regime’s partnership with Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), a state oil company, to combat the highly fluctuating price of oil in Venezuela along with the country’s overall steep decrease in oil production.
In 2015, Venezuela’s economic struggles continued, with Venezuela having the world’s highest rate of inflation that surpassed 100 percent, resulting from the Maduro regime’s socialist economic policy that ultimately redistributed the oil-generated wealth to Venezuela’s oligarchs. In January 2016, Maduro declared an economic emergency due to the country’s inability to provide for basic human needs to its citizens, leading to riots in the streets of Venezuela. In 2017, Maduro announced that leading opposition parties would be barred from taking part in the country’s Presidential election, which led the United States and other countries formally recognizing Juan Guaidó as the President of Venezuela, although countries such as China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran still continued to recognize President Nicolás Maduro.
In August 2019, President Donald Trump signed an Executive order to impose tough sanctions against Maduro’s totalitarian regime. It is the sense of Congress that Congress— recognizes that Venezuela has been impacted by hyperinflation, rampant crime, and significant government corruption; condemns the totalitarian Maduro regime and calls for the return of constitutional democratic government to Venezuela similar to the form of government that existed in the country from 1959 to 1999; and calls on President Joseph Biden to use relevant constitutional and statutory authorities that grant emergency powers to waive unnecessary environmental permitting requirements until the United States can reliably produce enough oil and natural gas to recapture America’s global energy dominance.