National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018 - Motion to Proceed - Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, I rise today to oppose unauthorized, undeclared, and unconstitutional war. What we have today is basically unlimited war, anywhere, anytime, anyplace upon the globe.

My amendment would sunset in 6 months the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for use of force. What does that mean? This was legislation passed many years ago to go after the people who attacked us on 9/11. I supported that battle, but I think the mission is long since over. I don't think anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty believes these authorizations from 16 years ago and 14 years ago--I don't think anyone with intellectual honesty believes they authorized war in seven different countries.

Not only is it lives we are losing, the American soldiers, the brave young men and women who are sent to distant lands and asked to give their lives for their country without the Senate taking the time to authorize the war--I think that is terribly unjust and should end.

There are some who argue that we don't even need to vote at all. Some of the Presidents, Republican and Democratic, have said they have article II--this is the second article of the Constitution--they say that by the Constitution, they can do what they want, when they want, where they want, and that Congress never has to approve their authorization and never has to give authority to go to war. These advocates of perpetual war argue that these powers are implicit and that no one can stop a President who wants to go to war.

This is diametrically opposite of what our Founding Fathers thought. Madison in particular disagreed. Madison wrote that the executive branch is the branch most prone to go to war; therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, vested that power in the Congress. Our Founding Fathers saw the history of Europe as the perpetual history of war--brothers fighting brothers, Kings of two different countries who were cousins, brothers, uncles, fathers, sons. The history of Europe was perpetual war.

When we broke away, we said: We are going to have some checks and balances in place. We are going to make it difficult to go to war. We are going to vest that power in the Congress.

But somewhere along the way, we lost our way, and we now commit ourselves to war or one man or one woman commits us to war without any vote by Congress. This is not what our Founding Fathers intended.

Former President Obama, when he was a candidate, wrote that no President should unilaterally go to war unless we were under imminent attack. That is the understanding of the Constitution that most originalists take. Yet, once Mr. Obama was in the White House, he bombed seven different countries. He expanded the use of Executive power. He expanded the war-making power of the Presidency, even while all along saying that he was for a narrower interpretation.

Candidate Trump said that the war in Afghanistan had lost its purpose, that it was a disaster, and that it should end. He said that on maybe 15 different occasions. Yet, now that he is in the White House, the generals have said: We must fight on. We must continue to fight. If we leave, the Taliban will take over.

My question is, When will the Afghans stand up and fight? We have spent $1 trillion helping them. We spent billions of dollars trying to convince them not to grow the poppy that becomes the opium that addicts the world. Yet last year Afghanistan had the biggest crop of poppy they have ever had in recent history. The people who run Afghanistan, whom we put in to govern, the Karzai family--full of drug dealers, crooks, and thieves. You wonder why they are not popular in their own country. But my question is, Where did the $1 trillion go? Why can't they defend themselves? Why do we have to fight their wars for them?

One thing is certain: The war was not authorized by you, the people, and the war was not authorized by us, the Congress, and therefore the war is unconstitutional. The war is unauthorized.

You say: Well, do we ever get it right? Have we ever voted to authorize war?

Yes, we have. When we went to war in Afghanistan the first time--and I would have voted yes--there was a vote, and overwhelmingly we voted to go in.

Some have argued: Well, is 6 months enough time for Congress to do anything? Can they get anything done in 6 months?

When we were attacked in Pearl Harbor, do you know how long it took us to declare war? Twenty-four hours. When we were attacked on 9/11, how long did it take us to authorize the military force to go in? Three days. People say Congress will never get it done. Maybe it is because we are divided.

We haven't been attacked, we have no clear purpose in Afghanistan, and there is no clear route to victory. Realize that in 2011 President Obama put 100,000 troops into Afghanistan. Sure, he pushed the Taliban back. Where did they go? To our ally Pakistan, which has gotten billions and billions of dollars of American welfare and as we sit here is destined to get another half a million of your money in American welfare over the next month. Billions and billions of dollars we send to Pakistan, but where does the Taliban live? In Pakistan. They run back and forth across the border.

So we have to ask the question, What is our purpose? Are we nation building? We spend hundreds of billions of dollars building their roads, building their bridges, building their schools. They bomb them, we bomb them--somebody bombs them, and then we rebuild them again.

We have $150 billion worth of damage in Texas. Do you know how we should pay for it? Let's quit sending welfare to foreign countries. Let's look at our country first, the problems we have here, rebuild our roads, our bridges, our schools, and not borrow it, not add to a $20 trillion debt. Take the money we are sending in welfare to foreign countries and let's rebuild our own.

We are at war in seven countries--none of them voted on by Congress. Is it expensive? Yes, to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Today we will debate the issue of war and whether Congress is constitutionally bound to declare war. We will debate whether one generation can bind another generation to perpetual war.

We are at the point where we have been in Afghanistan so long that within the next year, there will be people fighting who were not yet born on 9/11. This war no longer has anything to do with 9/11, no longer has anything to do with any vital interest in our country. It has to do with us believing we could reshape the world and make the world safe for democracy--everyone is going to love America, and everyone is going to become a western style democracy. Guess what? It is never going to happen.

Afghanistan is not even a real country; it is a collection of five or six tribal lands that were stuck together by Europeans who had no knowledge of the local people. They don't even like each other, much less us. Do you know what they call the President, who resides in Kabul? They call him the mayor of Kabul derisively because he has no sway over them. They are interested in who their chieftain is in their local area. They speak five different languages. They are never going to be a country.

If you want to be at war there, you want to send your sons and daughters to Afghanistan, you think somehow it will make our country safer, let's vote on it. So what I am advocating is a vote. For the first time in 16 years, I am advocating that we should vote on whether we should be at war. It should be a simple vote, but it is like pulling teeth. I have been trying very hard to get this vote for 5 years now. I am this close. I am hoping to get the vote today or tomorrow, but it isn't easy because we have been obstructing and obstructing, and no one wants to be on the line. Yet that is why we are elected--to put our names, our John Hancock, on the line. Are you for the war or against the war?

I am done. I am done. I am ready to come home. I remember my father saying, in 2008, in one of the Presidential debates, when they asked ``How will you get the people home?'' he said ``We just marched in, and we can just march out.''

There is no more meaning or purpose in Afghanistan. We had 100,000 troops there in 2011. All of the Taliban scurried into Pakistan, and as soon as the troops diminished, they went back. Some people take from that lesson--they say: We need 200,000 or we need half a million troops or we need to stay there forever and police every corner for them. I take it to mean that the governments themselves over there do not have the popular support of the people.

Stand up and fight for your country. Half of the people in Afghanistan who were helping us over there came to our country. They fled. It is the same with Iraq. All of the good people in Iraq--our translators, pro-Western people--came to our country. I understand wanting to come to a good place, but it would be like having the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, after they had fought the war and America had won, going back to England and saying: Oh, it is dangerous in the new country. Yet that is what we have been saying year after year, so the people who have pro-Western values from Afghanistan now live in the United States and the same in Iraq.

The thing is that we need to have some tough love. They need to practice some responsibility, and they need to take ownership of their country. But as long as you coddle people, as long as you give people stuff, and as long as you fight their wars for them, they are not going to step up and fight.

We are going to debate whether Afghanistan is a winnable war.

We will also debate whether war in Yemen is in our national interest. Most of America does not know that we are at war in Yemen. Most of America does not know where Yemen is. We need to know why we are there and whether it is of any value to the United States.

We will debate whether our support for Saudi Arabia is exacerbating starvation and the plague of cholera in Yemen.

We will debate whether it is in our national interest to topple the Government of Syria. There are 2 million Christians who live in Syria. Guess what. We may not understand it, but most of those Christians support Assad. On the side of the war that we have been funding and arming with the radical Islamists from Saudi Arabia and with the radical Islamists from Qatar are the people who hate the Christians. We are fighting on the side of the people who hate the Christians in Syria. Does that make Assad a good guy? No, but the thing is that maybe sometimes there is no good person in a war, no good side to a war.

For 5 years, I have been fighting to have a vote on whether we should be at war and where. I think there is no greater responsibility for a legislator than to vote on when we go to war. I tell the young soldiers whom I meet that it is my responsibility to discuss, debate, and think seriously about whether we send them to war.

One of the things that is most mistaken by politicians--even by some who are well intended--is that they think every soldier in America is jumping up and down to go to his eighth tour in Afghanistan. Go out and meet the soldiers. They are not allowed to be politically active, and they are not a political force on Washington, but I guarantee that if you were to ask our soldiers ``Are you ready to go back for your eighth tour of Afghanistan? Do you see purpose in Afghanistan?'' that they have lost sight of what that purpose is.

I met a Navy SEAL about a year ago. He had been in for 19 years--a tough guy, as they all are--and he said to me: Do you know what? We can defeat any enemy. We can kill any enemy. We can succeed at almost any mission that you give us. But the mistake is when you--Congress or a President--tell us to go somewhere and plant the flag and create a country. We are just not very good at nation building.

We have the world's most elite military. We can defend our country. We can defend, without question, against all invaders. Yet we are not very good at making countries out of places that are not.

What we should think about is that we have a $20 trillion debt. We borrow $1 million a minute. Even if you thought it was a good idea to try to create a country in Iraq or create a country in Afghanistan or create some sort of paradise in Yemen or Somalia or Nigeria or Libya or any of the places we are--even if you thought some paradise was a great thing--we have no money with which to do it. We are destroying our country from within. We are eating out the substance of the very greatness of America by borrowing $1 million a minute. We are flat broke. We cannot afford to be everybody's Uncle Sam. We cannot afford to be everybody's Uncle Patsy. We cannot afford to keep exporting our money and our jobs to the rest of the world. We need to look at our country and say it is time that we did things for our country, for our people, and it is time that we quit borrowing $1 million a minute.

The question is, Will the Senators--will those who gather to vote-- stand for the rule of law? Will the Senators stand for congressional authority for war? Will they stand for what the Constitution clearly says in article I, section 8, which is that Congress, not the President, shall declare war? Will the Senators sit idly by and let the wars continue unabated and unauthorized?

Some will argue that sunsetting the old authorizations is too soon, too dramatic. Really? So 6 months and 16 years later, we have not decided whether we should be at war or where we should be, and we cannot decide in 6 months? It took us 24 hours to decide with Pearl Harbor. It took us 3 days to decide with 9/11. I think 6 months is more than enough time.

Will Congress do its job unless it is forced to? All history says no. Why does Congress have an 11-percent approval rating from the people? Because it is not doing its job. How do we force Congress to do its job? Give it deadlines. How can we get a deadline? Let's pass this. Let's let the authorizations expire. Let's have a full-throated, deep, and heartfelt debate over whether we should be at war and where. Should we be at war in Afghanistan? Is there a winnable and foreseeable winnable future there? Should we be at war in Iraq? Syria? Yemen? Libya?

Today's vote can be seen as a proxy vote for the Constitution. Today's vote is not really a vote for or against any particular war. Today's vote is simply a vote on whether we will obey the Constitution.Today's vote is a vote on whether Congress will step up and do its job. Sixteen-and-a-half years is more than enough time to determine whether the war in Afghanistan or Yemen or Libya or Somalia has purpose or real meaning for our national security.

Often, it is said--very glibly--that, yes, it is in our national security interest. Realize when people tell you that they are giving you a conclusion. That is the beginning of the debate. We could debate for hours and hours. Hopefully, we will have some of that debate, but we have to debate what is in our vital national interest. Just to say it is so does not make it so.

Does anybody in America think the war in Yemen is in our vital interest? Most people do not know where Yemen is, much less think it is in our vital interest. Guess what. The war in Yemen may actually be opposed to our vital national interest. It may be making it worse. The war in Libya certainly did.

President Obama, when he chose to act illegally and intervene in Libya, made the world less safe. It was not his intention. I will grant him that his motives were to make it more safe, but he made the world less safe. Why? Because when Qadhafi was toppled, you got chaos. You have two competing governments in Libya, and you have chaos. If you want to set up a terrorist camp, if you are ready to go find a good place in the world, Libya is one of the prime places to go now because the government is gone and there is chaos. So I would argue that the intervention--one of the wars that we fought illegally, without the approval of the Senate, under the unilateral action of the President-- made us less safe. That is why we are supposed to debate before we go to war. We are less safe because of the Libyan war.

How about the Syrian war? It is the Christians on one side and us on the other side. That is the first problem I have. The people on the side of the war that we supported are the radical Islamists. ISIS was on the side that we were supporting. In fact, one of the most famous, if not the most famous and important leaked email about Hillary Clinton from WikiLeaks was when Hillary Clinton sent an email to John Podesta, writing to him: Hmm, we need to exert some influence on Saudi Arabia and Qatar because they are giving financial and strategic assistance to ISIS.

Realize that. Of the people we are selling weapons to in Saudi Arabia and Qatar--they get all of their weapons from us--guess who they are giving them to. ISIS. They were on the same side as ISIS.

Let's say you do not believe that. You say: Oh, I don't believe that. Certainly we would not have done that because we would not have supported the bad people.

Let's say we just supported the so-called moderates. They are still fighting against the guys who are protecting the Christians.

What was the net effect of the Syrian civil war? Before we got involved, Assad was winning the war. Once again, like Qadhafi, he is not a great guy, but he does defend the Christians, and the Christians do support him. We turned the tide of the war by flowing in hundreds and hundreds of tons of weapons in 2013--us, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia-- but these weapons went in indiscriminantly. What happened when we turned the tide of the war? Chaos in a vacuum. In that vacuum, guess who arose. ISIS.

When you created chaos in Libya by fighting an unconstitutional, unauthorized war, you got more terrorism, more chaos, and the world was a less safe place.

When we got involved in Syria without the authorization of Congress--unconstitutional, unauthorized--what did you get? Chaos and the rise of ISIS.

What do we have in Yemen right now? In Yemen, you have a Sunni-backed government in exile that is supported by the Saudis, and you have these Houthi rebels who are supported by Iran. But that is not all you have in Yemen. You also have al-Qaida of the Arab Peninsula--three different groups. It is said that al-Qaida of the Arab Peninsula is actually the strongest remaining presence of al-Qaida. Is it possible, in our supporting the Saudi Arabian-backed government against the Houthis, that they fight and kill each other to such a degree of chaos that al-Qaida of the Arab Peninsula fills the vacuum? If you look at Libya, that is what happened. If you look at Syria, that is what happened. What if it happens in Yemen?

You have to ask, what is our vital interest in Yemen? Why are we in Yemen? Why are we supplying bombs to the Saudis? Is it somehow making us safer from terrorism? Are we killing them over there so they do not kill us over here? Guess what. We may be creating more terrorists than we can possibly kill.

The Saudis bombed a funeral procession of civilians. They killed 150 people, and they wounded 500. Do you think they are ever going to forget about it? That is going to be passed down through oral tradition for a thousand years, and they will talk about the day that the Saudis came and bombed civilians. They will also say in the next breath: Guess who gave them the bombs. The Americans. Guess who helped to guide the planes. Guess who refueled the planes in the air. The Americans refueled the Saudis the day that they came to bomb a funeral procession.

So, in the end, we killed 150 people. You might say: Well, they were all bad people. They were at the funeral of a bad person. Do you think that we killed 150 and that will be the end of it, or do you think that those who were wounded, who survived and went back to their villages, told every one of their neighbors and everyone in the village about the day the Saudis came with the American bombs?

We have to ask ourselves, are we making things better? Is Yemen in our vital national interest? Are we making things better or are we making things worse? Is there a possibility that it will lead to such chaos that al-Qaida of the Arab Peninsula will rise up and become a real threat to us? What else is happening in Yemen? It is one of the poorest countries on the planet, as 17 million people, as we speak, live on the edge of starvation--17 million people. They are having the largest outbreak of cholera. Where is most of this happening? Where is most of the starvation, most of the killing, and most of the cholera? It is in the areas that are being bombed by the Saudis. They have bombed the infrastructure into ruins, and there is no clean water, so cholera is spreading.

War is probably the most common and most important precipitating factor in humanitarian disasters. If you look at humanitarian disasters around the world, you will find that the No. 1 cause is war, and Yemen was already a poor place to begin with.

You are fighting the war, and nobody asked your permission. You are fighting a war in Yemen through the proxy of Saudi Arabia, and no one has asked my permission. This is a grave insult to us. It is dangerous to the Treasury, but it is also your sons and daughters who are being asked to go to Yemen now.

We had a manned raid in Yemen and lost one of our Navy SEALs. I have asked what we got, and they just sort of push me off and say, oh, they might tell me on another occasion. No one will tell me what we got.
They claim that it was great, that it was the best stuff you could ever find, that it is going to prevent loss of life. But the thing is, we have no business in Yemen. We have not voted to go to war in Yemen. We have been at war 16 years--the longest war now--in Afghanistan. There is no purpose left. There is no future for the war in Afghanistan.

Today's vote will be remembered as the first vote--if we have it--in 16 years on whether to continue fighting everywhere, all the time, without ever having to renew the authorization of Congress. I hope Senators will think long and hard about the seven ongoing wars and, at the very least, show regard for our young soldiers and go on the record to uphold their oath of office. Each Senator should uphold their oath of office and defend the Constitution and its requirements with regard to war.

I, for one, will stand with soldiers, young and brave, sent to fight in distant lands in a forgotten, forever war. I will stand for the Constitution. I will stand with our Founding Fathers, who did everything possible to make the initiation of war difficult.

I hope my colleagues will stand for something. I hope my colleagues will finally vote to do their constitutional duty and oversee and/or discontinue the many wars we are in. But even if my colleagues say: War, war--that is the answer--everywhere, all the time, by golly, come down and put your name on it. If you think we should be at war in Afghanistan, vote for it. If you think we should be at war in Yemen, come down to the floor and vote for it.

What does everybody do? Pass the buck. Let the President do it. Let the President take the blame if things don't go well. We should vote. So on my amendment, you will probably see that the majority will say: We don't want any responsibility; let the President take care of that.

My vote isn't actually directly on any of the wars, although I do oppose most of the wars we are involved in. My vote is on whether or not we should vote on whether we should be at war.

So for those who oppose my vote, they oppose the Constitution. They oppose obeying the Constitution, which says that we are supposed to vote. They are going to say: No, I refuse to vote on any of these wars.

All my amendment does is to sunset an authorization that really doesn't apply to anything we are doing at the moment, and it says that in 6 months' time, you have to come up with an authority to go to war.
I hope my colleagues will stand for something. I hope they will finally vote to do their constitutional duty. It is the least we can do to honor the service of our brave young soldiers.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

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