Motion to Discharge--S.J. Res. 39

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, today the Senate will discuss questions of war and peace. Today the Senate will do its constitutional duty for a change. Let's be very clear, though. The Senate does this under duress.

The Senate has abdicated its role in foreign policy for too long. We have been at war nearly continuously for 15 years and the initiation, conclusion, and resumption of war has not had debate in this body. The last time we voted on whether we should be at war was the Iraq war, which was a very emotional vote. It is a war that has long been over.

There is now a new war in Iraq and Syria, but there has been no congressional authorization. Therefore, it is illegal and unconstitutional.

Today's debate will attempt to debate whether or not we should initiate war in Yemen. It is an indirect vote because they won't allow a direct vote. In fact, they would not have allowed this debate had I and several others not forced it. But this is a bipartisan coalition that has brought this issue to the floor and said: We should debate issues of war.

I know young men who have lost limbs in the war. I know young men and their families who have sacrificed their lives. They deserve to have the country debate when and where we should be at war. It should never be something that we slide into.

Now, some will say: No, we are debating over whether to sell arms to Saudi Arabia. Yes, but I would also argue that we are at war in Yemen. Whether or not we sell arms to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen is something that should be debated because it is not just about selling arms. It is about whether we will be complicit in a war in Yemen.

If there is no debate in Congress, if there is no debate in the public, are we ready to spend lives, money, and treasure on another war in Yemen? People will say: Oh, no big deal, we are not really at war in Yemen. Well, yes, we are. We are refueling Saudi bombers that are dropping bombs in Yemen. There is said to be over 3,000 innocent people who have died in Yemen from Saudi bombs. What do you think happens to those families when 100 people die in a wedding in Yemen? What do you think happens to those families? Do you think they have a warm, fuzzy feeling for Saudi Arabia and the United States, which is helping to pick the targets and fuel the planes? Don't you think we as a country ought to have a debate before we go to war? Don't you think we ought to read the Constitution?

Our Founding Fathers had a significant, detailed, and explicit debate over war. They explicitly took the power to declare war, and they gave it to the legislature. Madison wrote that the executive is the branch most prone to war. Therefore, with studied care, the Constitution took the power to declare war and vested it in the legislature. This is repeated throughout the Federalist papers. It is repeated by all of our Founding Fathers that the power to initiate war was too important to place in the hands of one individual.

But over the last decade and a half, we have been at war in Libya without the permission of the American people or Congress. We have been at war in Syria and Iraq without the permission of the American people. Now we are at war in Yemen without the approval of Congress or the American people.

So this is a twofold debate today. It is a debate over whether the United States should be at war without a vote of Congress. I think our Founding Fathers were clear on this. It is absolutely certain that it was supposed to be a prerogative of Congress, but there are also practical concerns.

Some have come to the floor and said: Well, Saudi Arabia is an imperfect ally. Well, I would go a little bit further. Saudi Arabia has often done things that have not been good for America, have not been in our national interest, and have not been consistent with our understanding of human rights.

Let's give a few examples. The girl of Qatif was raped by seven men. Saudi Arabia put her in prison for the crime of being alone with a man. You see, it is the woman's fault because women don't get to testify. The testimony comes from her attackers, and the woman of Qatif was given 7 years in prison and 200 lashes.

There is a poet who was writing in Indonesia who is Saudi Arabian and who was picked up by Interpol and taken home to be given the death penalty for possible criticism of the state religion.

There was a young 17-year-old man who is a Shia, a minority, who was a protester at a rally. I think he is 21 now. He has been in prison for 4 years. His uncle was beheaded by the government 1 month or 2 ago and was, by all appearances, a religious leader, not a collaborator, not an espionage perpetrator. The man is now 21, has been in prison for 4 years, and faces beheading in Saudi Arabia.

You might say: Well, human rights just aren't important. We need to do what is right for us in the region. We have given Saudi Arabia $100 billion worth of weapons--$100 billion. OK, we didn't give it to them; we sold it to them. But you know what. I think the taxpayer owns our weaponry. We have an ownership interest in our weaponry. This is not the free market. The weaponry was developed with taxpayer money and with explicit reservations that we in Congress can control who it is sold to. So we do need to ask, and it is an important debate, and we should be having it here in this body instead of leaving it up to the President. Let's have the debate.

Is Saudi Arabia a good ally?

Well, we have had this war in Syria for some time now. It is a messy war, a sectarian war. Most of the rebel groups are Sunni Muslims and the government is more allied with the Shiites. In this war, there have been hundreds and hundreds of tons of weapons--some by us, but maybe 10-fold more by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. There has been public report after public report after public report saying that these weapons that are being poured into the country by Saudi Arabia have been given indiscriminately. They have been weapons about which some would say: Oh, they are being given to the pro-Americans. One group said that when they were done with Assad, they would go after Israel. It doesn't sound like people who are necessarily our friends.

According to public reports, many of these weapons that Saudi Arabia has bought from us and channeled into Syria have gone to al-Nusra, an off-branch of Al Qaeda. They used the justification to go to war in Syria--the 9/11 justification that said we would go after those who attacked us. I thought that was Al Qaeda. Are we now giving arms to Saudi Arabia, which is giving arms to Al Qaeda and al-Nusra? There have been some reports that the arms have gone directly to ISIS.

I think it has been indiscriminate, inexcusable, and not in our national interest.

How do we know what is in our national interest? We have to have a debate. Instead, Congress wants to be a lap dog for an imperial Presidency--Republican or Democrat, rubberstamped. Here you go--not even a rubberstamp. There is no vote, no discussion, nothing. We are forcing this debate against the wishes of both parties, because both parties are complicit in this. This is not a Republican versus Democrat issue. This is a bipartisan foreign policy consensus that says that we should always give weapons without conditions, indiscriminately. It is $100 billion of weapons to Saudi Arabia--more than any other President. President Obama has given more.

You say: Why does he do this? Well, because we released about $100 billion worth of Iranian assets, and the Saudis bug him and say: Well, Iran is getting all this money. We need weapons, too. So it fuels an arms race over there.

But here is the great irony of this. It is something that is so ironic that this body cannot overcome it. Unanimously, this body voted to let 9/11 victims sue Saudi Arabia. Now, why would we let them do that unless the people who voted unanimously actually believe that there is a possibility Saudi Arabia had something to do with 9/11? So the body that voted unanimously that there is a possibility that Saudi Arabia had something to do with 9/11 is now going to vote overwhelmingly to send weapons to the country they think might have had something to do with 9/11?

Is Saudi Arabia an ally or an enemy? I sometimes call them ``frenemy.'' I am not arguing that they never do anything that is good for us. They do on occasion. They also do many things that aren't good for us. As we look through the list of things and we look to the arms that have been channeled into this region, we wonder: Will we be better off? Will our national security be better off or worse off?

For example, as to the weapons that Saudi Arabia poured into Syria, they pushed back Assad, and there occurred a vacuum in the Syrian civil war. Guess who came to occupy that vacuum? Guess who grew stronger and stronger in the absence of Assad and in the chaos of the civil war? ISIS.

In Yemen, you have several factions fighting. It is maybe not quite as complicated as Syria, but you have Salafis, people who believe in the primitive, intolerant form of Islam that Saudi Arabia practices. These people are allied with Saudi Arabia. They are fighting against rebels they call the Houthi rebels. The Houthi rebels are allied with Iran and in all likelihood are supplied by Iran. They fight each other. It is somewhat of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

You say: Don't we hate Iran so much that we have to be involved everywhere to stop Iran? I don't know. Saudi Arabia funds hatred around the world. Does Iran fund madrassas in our country? That is a really good question. I don't think I heard anybody ask it.

I am not apologizing for Iran, by any means, but Iran, to my knowledge, does not fund madrassas in our country. Saudi Arabia does. Saudi Arabia funds madrassas around the world that teach hatred of America, hatred of the West, and hatred of Christianity. By the way, if you are a Christian, don't bother trying to go to Saudi Arabia. You are not allowed in Mecca, you are not allowed in Medina, and God forbid you bring a Bible into their country. This is whom we want to send more weapons to?

What of the Yemen war? What happens as the weapons pour into Yemen? Is it possible that ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula sit by laughing and rubbing their hands, watching the war between the Houthis and the Salafis, and then step into the breach? It is what happened in Syria.

Are we not to learn the lessons of the Middle East? Are we to completely stick our heads in the sand and say: We must always give weapons, and if we don't give weapons, that is isolationism. That is, literally, what people are saying. It is isolationism not to send $1 billion worth of weapons. To send $1 billion less would somehow be isolationism. Well, perhaps it would send a message.

There have been people who have described Saudi Arabia as both arsonists and firefighters--throwing fuel and adding fuel to the flames and at times being our friend and being helpful, maybe giving us some information or some intelligence.

As to the Syrian civil war, nothing good has come from that civil war. Arms have been plowed into that country from both sides, and there is nothing good. But one concrete thing has come from the Syrian civil war--millions of refugees, millions of displaced people. They have flooded Europe, and they are wanting to come to America also.

What do you think will happen in Yemen if we put more weapons in there? What do you think happens in Yemen if we put more arms into Yemen? More or less refugees? There will be millions of refugees coming. They will be flooding out of Yemen, if they can get out of there, as the war accelerates.

Does Saudi Arabia help with the refugees? Does Qatar help? Do any of the Gulf States take any refugees? Zero. Saudi Arabia has taken zero refugees. So while they fan the flames, while they send arms into Syria and arms into Yemen and bombs into Yemen, they take zero refugees from Yemen or from Syria. Somehow it always seems to be America's responsibility to pay for everything and to absorb the brunt of the civil wars throughout the Middle East.

I think there is another answer. I am not saying that we can't be allied with Saudi Arabia, but I am saying that they need a significant message sent to them. I am saying they need to change their behavior, and I am saying there needs to be evidence that Saudi Arabia has changed their behavior. This evidence needs to be that they quit funding madrassas that preach hate; that they come into the modern world and quit beheading people when they don't like what they say; that they quit beating and imprisoning the victims of rape.

I think we should think long and hard about war. I think war should always be the last resort, not the first resort. I don't think it should be easy to go to war. I think our Founding Fathers understood that. They did not want to give one man or one woman the power to declare war, the power to initiate war. That power was specifically and explicitly given to Congress.

There is something to be said about the corrupting influence of power. Lincoln said: If you want to test a man, give him power. The true test is whether a man can resist the allure of power. I think this President has, on many occasions, failed that allure, whether it is privacy or whether it is issues of war.

President Obama once was a defender of privacy and once was a defender of the Constitution, but for some reason, the power of the office has caused him to forget the constitutional restraints that disallow even him from creating, causing, engaging in war without our permission.

But there is blame to go around. For partisan reasons, we want to blame the other party sometimes, but if you look at the blame and who is to blame, there is a great deal of blame to go around--the President for taking us to war without our permission, but even more so, Congress for its abdication of our role, our responsibility.

The last vote on going to war was for the Iraq war in 2002. We have not voted to go back to war. We have abdicated our responsibility.

There is a young man in the military currently who is actually suing over an order he was given to go to war because he said it is not constitutional for him to go to war without the permission of Congress. The President once understood this.

This is a proxy debate over whether Congress has a role, whether we are relevant in foreign policy, and whether we will stand up and do our duty. We should be debating on this floor with every Member present whether the President will be authorized to fight a war in Syria and Iraq.

We should also have that same debate on Yemen because we are involved in the war in Yemen, and everyone who loses their life there believes that it is not only Saudi Arabia that is bombing them, they believe it is us. We are refueling the bombers in midair, we are helping to choose the targets, and we have people embedded within this war zone. So make no mistake, we are at war in Yemen. We are at war illegally and unconstitutionally and without the permission of Congress.

We should immediately stop everything we are doing and debate a use of authorization of force for the Middle East. Everybody says they are for it on both sides, yet it never happens because it is messy. It is messy also because I think the American people might wake up to the facts. They might wake up to the fact that ISIS grew in the midst of a Syrian civil war. They might wake up to the fact that our involvement in the Yemen war may well make Al Qaeda stronger, may well make ISIS stronger.

This is a twofold debate. It is a debate over whether you can go to war without the authority of Congress, but it is also a debate over selling arms and whether that will be in our national interest. I think we still do own these arms. Those arms are not privately owned by a company. We paid for the research for them. They are owned by the taxpayer, and by law there are restrictions as to where they can be sold.

I don't believe Saudi Arabia is an ally we can trust. The fact is, they continue to support schools in our country--schools that preach hatred of our country, preach hatred of Israel, and preach hatred of civilization, as far as I am concerned. I just don't see how we send them the correct message by saying: You can have unlimited arms from us.

Some say this is too far. I say this is too little. But I think there will be something that occurs today. It will occur despite what the majority wants. This is a debate, but this is not the end of the debate. If we lose the battle on the vote, we will have begun the debate over whether Congress is relevant. Whether or not we go to war without the permission of Congress, this is the beginning of the debate. Part of the victory is that we are having this debate, but mark my words--we are having this debate only because it has been forced upon Congress. No one on either side of the aisle wants this debate. If they could, this would be shuffled under the rug. It has occurred only because the law mandates that they allow it to occur. But this should be occurring on moments of war, on issues of war, and I regret that we don't do it.

I hope in the future this will be a lesson to the American people and to the Senate that it is our duty, and there is no duty above our duty to decide when and where we go to war.

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Mr. PAUL. Madam President, there is probably no greater issue before Congress at any time in our lives or any time in our service than whether we should go to war. I think it is a mistake to slide into war. I think it is a mistake to allow the power to declare war to default to one person. Our Founding Fathers were very clear throughout the Federalist Papers, explicitly in the Constitution, that the power to declare war shouldn't go to one person; that the power to declare war should be determined by a vote of Congress. We have abdicated that role, and the vote today is a vote over whether we should try to reclaim that power.

Some will say: Well, it is just arms, and if we don't sell them, somebody else will.

Well, you know, I don't think of national security as a jobs program. I don't think of whether we create jobs here at home. I think about the young man who lives down the road from me who lost both legs and an arm, OK? I think about the human toll of war. I think about whether there is a national security interest, but I think nothing at all about whether any jobs are created.

If we make weapons and we have a weapons industry, that is good for our country when we make them for ourselves, but when we are selling weapons around the world, by golly, we shouldn't sell weapons to people who are not putting them to good purpose. What we have found is that Saudi Arabia is an irresponsible ally.

One of the great ironies that nobody here can quite explain is that this body has voted unanimously to let the people of 9/11 sue Saudi Arabia. So we are going to let the person who we think might have had something to do with Saudi Arabia have more weapons? What kind of signal is that to Saudi Arabia?

Would Saudi Arabia be bereft of weapons if we held $1 billion out? No. We have already sold them $99 billion worth. They have enough to blow up the Middle East 10 times over. I think it might send them a message.

Do you know what. Stop the sale, send them a message. Do you know what the message might be? Quit funding madrasas that teach hate in our country. Don't tell us you are going to stop doing it.

Saudi Arabia, tomorrow, stop funding madrasas in America that teach hatred, that teach intolerance. Stop putting Christians to death. Stop putting people who convert to Christianity to death. Stop beheading protesters.

The one young man who is a protestor in Saudi Arabia is scheduled to be beheaded and crucified. Does that sound like somebody who is a great ally with a great human rights record?

The young woman who was raped by seven men--she was put in prison. She was told it was her fault for being alone with the man. She was publicly whipped.

Poets have been picked up around the world and brought back to Saudi Arabia to be whipped for what they write.

Do you trust Saudi Arabia to do the right things with your weapons? These weapons are owned by the American taxpayer. We built them. We did the research into them. Private companies make money off of them, but it isn't about them making money. It isn't about them getting to sell the weapons instead of Russia selling the weapons. It is about our national security.

Saudi Arabia's indiscriminate placement of weapons into the Syrian civil war has led to the rise of ISIS. ISIS grew stronger as Saudi Arabia was flying weapons to al-Nusra, Al Qaeda, and likely some of them to ISIS.

We now have a war in Yemen. Yes, we are directly involved in the war. Yes, this is a vote not just about weapons, this is a vote about whether we should be at war in Yemen. We are refueling the Saudi bombers in midair. Our military planes are, in a sophisticated fashion, refueling their planes. Do you think the Yemenis think: Oh, no big deal. You know, 3,000 citizens have died. When you go to a wedding in Yemen and you get a bomb dropped on you from Saudi Arabia, do you think you have warm, fuzzy feelings for our great ally, Saudi Arabia?

Absolutely, we should be telling Saudi Arabia what to do. These are our weapons. Do you know when they are willing to listen? It is when we argue from a position of strength.

Do you know what is the ultimate weakness? Give them what they want. Giving the arms industry what they want is the ultimate weakness. We look weak, and we look bowed before and cowed before the Saudi Arabians.

As they sit back in their long robes sipping tea, refugees bob about the Mediterranean. People are starving and displaced in Yemen. Not one of them will come to Saudi Arabia, not one of them will be allowed in the country.

Yes, this is a debate about war, and this is a debate about whether you want to be at war in Yemen. It is not just a debate about sending and selling another $1 billion of weapons, it is about should we be at war in Yemen. It is about should we be at war anywhere without the permission of Congress.

This is not a small occurrence. This is not a small happening. This is a big deal. This is the most important vote that any legislator will ever have. Should we be at war or shouldn't we be at war?

Those who want to make this about a jobs program, about we are going to get some sales of tanks--no, it is not a jobs program. It is about young men and women dying in a war. It is about whether it is in our national interests. It is about whether we are going to be safer. Shouldn't we have a debate over whether the war in Yemen is making us safer?

We certainly should have had a debate about the war in Libya. Did that make us safer? Once Qadhafi was gone, chaos ensued. ISIS controls one-third of Libya after the war as a result of the war.

We are now bombing in Libya. We are bombing the replacement to the government we bombed. So we bombed Qadhafi into oblivion. We don't like the people who replaced him either so we are bombing them. Does anybody think that maybe it is a mistake?

This is what this debate is about. What should American foreign policy be? Should Congress lie down and be a lapdog for the President-- let him do whatever he wants? That is what a vote on this will mean if you let the President have what he wants, if you let the arms industry have what they want because they can make a buck selling tanks into a war that is a catastrophe.

In the Wall Street Journal, Simon Henderson wrote that the chaos and violence in Yemen is such that it would be an improvement to call it a civil war.

It is hard to know who is friend and foe. Even our former Ambassador to Syria has said, in Syria, it is almost impossible to know friend from foe.

People have repeatedly written that Saudi weapons in Syria have gone to the wrong people. It is not like: Whoops, Saudi Arabia is sometimes wrong, and they are not that bad. They have a horrific human rights record. There are people who believe them to be complicit in 9/11. This body voted unanimously to let the 9/11 victims sue them, and now this body wants to give them weapons? Does no one sense the irony?

As we move forward on this vote, everyone should understand that this is a proxy vote for whether we should be at war in the Middle East because neither side--the leadership on neither side--will allow a vote on whether we should authorize force. Neither side will let the constitutional debate occur on whether we should be at war.

I see my colleague from Connecticut. Would he like to have the last word?

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