Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act--

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I thank Senator Sanders for his leadership on this issue. It is an honor to be here with my friend and colleague, the Senator from Vermont, to talk about our joint resolution to force a vote on U.S. military involvement in a civil war that is going on in Yemen.

Whether one is present in the Senate Chamber today or whether one is tuning in from home, I hope you will listen closely for the next hour or so, so we can fill you in on the unauthorized Middle East war that your U.S. Government is supporting.

This war in Yemen has killed tens of thousands of innocent victims-- human beings, lest we forget--each with immeasurable, innate, God-given dignity. This war has created refugees, orphans, and widows. It has cost many millions of dollars. Believe it or not, at the end of the day, according to at least one U.S. Government report, it has, arguably, undermined our fight against terrorist threats, such as ISIS, rather than to advance those efforts.

I will expand on these uncomfortable facts in a few minutes, but, for now, let's focus on just one thing. Our military's involvement in Yemen has not been authorized by the U.S. Congress as is required by the U.S. Constitution. Article I, section 8 of the Constitution is pretty clear on this point. It reads that Congress shall have the power to declare war--Congress, not the President, not the Pentagon--Congress.

This is the branch of government that is most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals. It makes sense that this power would only be granted to that branch of government. Yet, in 2015, President Obama initiated our military involvement in Yemen without having permission from Congress, without having an authorization for the use of military force, without having a declaration of war. The current administration has continued Obama's war.

Senator Sanders and I, along with Senator Murphy and our six other cosponsors, are giving Congress a chance to fix this error by debating and voting on our Nation's continued involvement in this illegal, unauthorized war in Yemen.

Now, as our opponents claim, if this war is necessary, then, surely, they will be willing to come down to this floor within the Senate Chamber and defend it. Surely they will be willing to come onto the floor of the Senate and onto the floor of the House and seek authorization from Congress as the Constitution demands. Let's have an honest reckoning about this war today.

At this very moment, a tragedy is unfolding in Yemen. Very sadly, it is a tragedy for which our Nation shares some blame. Here are just a few facts about this war in Yemen, which is now approaching its third year: Fifteen million human souls in Yemen lack clean water and sanitation, and 8 million are at risk of starvation. The Yemeni people have been visited by the worst cholera outbreak in recorded human history--over 1 million cases. Every 10 minutes, a child under the age of 5 dies of preventable causes. A total of 10,000 civilians have been killed in this war, and 40,000 more civilians have been wounded in this war.

I think it is important to discuss the human toll this war is inflicting. I think it is especially important to have discussions like this one at the outset so that as we go into a conflict, the stakes are clear. For thousands of human beings, the decision we make in this Chamber will make the difference between life and death. This is one of the many reasons it is so important to keep reminding ourselves that the Founding Fathers were very clear about this. They didn't leave any ambiguity in terms of identifying who has the power to make decisions like this one, who has the power to decide when we go to war. Article I, section 8, says that Congress shall have the power to declare war.

From time to time, I hear it argued that declarations of war are somehow antiquated, that they are outdated, that they are anachronisms akin to ceremonial relics like powdered wigs or a key to the city, akin to a society whose principal mode of transportation involved a horse and a buggy, but that isn't true. These principles are as true today as they were then. Nothing about those principles has become outdated.

If you read the Founding Fathers, it is very clear that they thought the power to declare war was, in fact, important. They deliberately considered the matter and withheld it from the President for a reason. They did not vest this power in the Office of the Presidency, and that was a conscious, deliberate, and I believe wise choice.

To quote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 69, the Founding Fathers wanted their President to be ``much inferior'' in power to a King. Kings declare war unilaterally. They can make life-or-death military decisions--on a whim if they want to. They don't need to go and seek support from the public before doing so. In our system, Presidents, by contrast, have to garner support from the public and the legislative branch before initiating war--far from a unilateral decision. The decision to go to war in America is supposed to be based on collaboration and consensus so that our Nation will be united to the greatest degree possible when we go through trying conflicts, at that moment when unity is what is so badly needed.

So which does the modern Executive resemble more today--a President as the Founding Fathers understood that term or a King? The answer is uncomfortably clear from the string of unauthorized military excursions that Presidents from both political parties have initiated in recent decades.

Of course, some people claim that the President has broad constitutional authority to make war as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. They are absolutely right. The President of the United States is, in fact, the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, but this is not the beginning and the end to the question. This does not mean the President may authorize at will military excursions around the globe for any reason or no reason at all without authorization from Congress. It does not mean that. It means nothing close to that. Only Congress can authorize a military campaign. Once Congress has done so, then the President has broad authority, vast discretion to decide how specifically to command the Armed Forces to victory.

There is one important notable exception to this big principle, and that exception arises specifically in the event of an attack on the United States. The Founders were wise. They anticipated that there could be threats to the homeland so serious that it might be physically impossible for Congress to respond quickly enough, so they preserved to the President the power to ``repel sudden attacks,'' in the words of James Madison.

Clearly, this strategy--we might describe it as a ``break glass in case of emergency'' kind of strategy. It is that kind of power. It is a ``break glass in times of emergency'' kind of power. It is supposed to be used only under extreme, extraordinary circumstances where Congress cannot convene in time to save the Nation. The Founders did not intend for the Commander in Chief's power to be used to justify military intervention in civil wars 8,000 miles away. That authorization can come only from this body in the form of a declaration of war or in the form of an authorization for use of military force. To date, we have not considered either one of these, much less voted on them and passed them in the case of this civil war in Yemen.

So I would ask my colleague, Senator Sanders from Vermont, how long the American people can be expected to ignore our involvement in a foreign war.
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Mr. LEE. I am not sure what constitutes oversized, but I have it on good authority that the ordinary Senate rules don't allow for a picture this big without unanimous consent. So, therefore, I sought it.

The picture itself paints an image and leaves an impression that itself is oversized and that demonstrates the humanity of this conflict. You see a child standing in what appears to be a school in an ordinary learning environment that has been rendered unusable by the devastating impact of war.

Now, war does happen. Conflicts do arise. This is one of the reasons why it was built into not only our system of laws but our foundational governing structure in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers understood that war would arise from time to time, but they carefully divided up the power, recognizing how devastating its implications could be, recognizing that bad things are a little bit less likely to happen if you don't allow too much power to be concentrated in the hands of a few.

Over time, Congress and the Presidency have had a little bit of a tug-of-war, as I referenced earlier, about where the Commander in Chief power ends and the war power begins.

In 1973 Congress reasserted its constitutional role and tried to clarify some of what had been described as a gray area by passing the War Powers Resolution. The crisis that led Congress to create this important law in many ways was reminiscent of the conflict that we are discussing today.

The War Powers Act was passed in response to the Vietnam war. That war began with the insertion of just a small handful of U.S. military advisers in 1950, but their ranks grew and grew gradually but steadily, so that our commitment in Vietnam spiraled into a decades-long, bloodied conflict. Presidents from both parties abused their authority in order to wage this far-off war.

Finally, in 1973, Congress decided it was time to bring our boys home. So it repealed the limited legal authority for the war it had granted to then-President Johnson 7 years earlier.

In defiance of Congress, President Nixon continued the war, citing his authority as Commander in Chief. So Congress drafted the War Powers Resolution to give itself a way to remove our armed services personnel from unauthorized, unlawful, and unconstitutional war zones.

The War Powers Resolution states that the President must notify Congress within 48 hours of committing American troops to ``hostilities'' or ``imminent hostilities.'' The War Powers Resolution goes on to provide that the President must remove troops from the conflict if Congress does not authorize their presence within 60 days or a maximum of 90 days in the case of certain emergencies.

Congress's passage of the War Powers Resolution was a bold assertion of its constitutional responsibility in the face of a chronically overreaching executive branch. In fact, Congress's desire to uphold the Constitution was so strong that it actually overrode President Nixon's veto of the War Powers Resolution.

Members of Congress today could certainly learn a thing or two from their predecessors' commitment to constitutional duties and to the limited power possessed by each branch of government.

Since the War Powers Resolution was passed in 1973, defenders of a royal executive have tried to go around it and tried to circumvent it altogether by claiming that their unauthorized wars somehow do not qualify as ``hostilities.''

We heard this claim by President Obama in response to Libya, and we heard it again in response to Yemen. It is the official position of the U.S. Department of Defense that we are not engaged in ``hostilities'' in Yemen unless our troops ``are actively engaged in exchanges of fire with opposing units of hostile forces.''

To translate, the U.S. Government really claims that it is not engaged in hostilities unless U.S. troops are on the ground being shot at by the enemy.

It stretches the imagination, and it stretches the English language beyond its breaking point to assert that our military is not engaged in hostilities in Yemen. Consider for a moment what it is that the U.S. military is doing as part of the Saudi-led coalition effort against the neighbors of Saudi Arabia, the Yemeni neighbors.

U.S. military personnel are assigned to the joint combined planning cell in Saudi Arabia, where they are sharing military intelligence with the Saudis and helping to target enemies within Yemen for attack. Our forces are also refueling coalition bombers in midair on combat missions. If sending our military men and women to foreign lands to fuel a country's bombers and handpick its targets does not qualify as ``hostilities,'' then those words have lost their meaning. What does the word ``hostility'' mean if it cannot be said to encompass that?

As it happens, the War Powers Resolution was designed to stop secret and unauthorized military activities such as these. So Congress is well within its right to vote on whether these activities should continue.

That is why this joint resolution that is authored by Senator Sanders and cosponsored by Senator Murphy, myself, and six others represents a big chance--a significant chance, a constitutional moment--for Congress to do the right thing, for Congress to do its job, and for Congress to represent the American people. After all, this is their blood and their treasure that are being put on the line. That is why the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution alike contemplate actions by Congress and not solely unilateral action by the executive branch.

I ask my colleagues Senator Sanders and Senator Murphy: Isn't it arguable that by overreaching in this instance, we might in fact be making matters worse? Couldn't we be putting our country in a position of less security rather than more?

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Vermont. I appreciate his remarks and his leadership on this, and I appreciate the remarks that Senator Durbin and Senator Murphy have added to this discussion.

I want to close by pointing out that in addition to being unlawful and in addition to being unconstitutional, our involvement in Yemen is unproductive in the fight against terrorism. The Houthis we are fighting are a regional force--one that doesn't harbor ambitions of attacking the U.S. homeland. While the Houthis are certainly no friend of ours, neither are they a serious threat to our country. Yet we are diverting considerable resources to fighting the Houthis, resources that would be better spent fighting more substantial threats--threats that harbor, rather openly, ambitions of bringing down the United States, of attacking the United States. These are threats like al-Qaida or ISIS. On that point, the best evidence we have suggests that their involvement in Yemen has arguably undermined our fight against ISIS.

The State Department's most recent study, its most recent ``Country Reports on Terrorism''--which, by the way, happens to be the authority on that subject for Congress and the American people--says that we have inadvertently strengthened ISIS by killing off its antagonists, the Houthis. This just reinforces the farcical character that our military excursions in the Middle East have the potential to undertake. We bomb with one hand; we give humanitarian aid with the other hand. We whack a terrorist from one group, and another springs up in its place.

Defenders of our efforts in this war in Yemen often claim that the real reason we are fighting the Houthis is that they are a proxy for Iran, which is the true threat to our Nation and to the world. This would be perhaps a reasonable rationale, but there are conflicting reports about the Houthis and their ties to Iran. Iran has expansionist views; the Houthis do not. Hezbollah is an officially listed as a foreign terrorist organization; the Houthis are not. The Houthis may be a rogue non- State actor, destabilizing their own country, but they are not a threat to America--at least not yet. By helping the Saudis bomb them, we only give the Houthis reasons to start to hate us. Our involvement in Yemen detracts from our ability to be a diplomatic resource and the peacemaker in the region.

In closing, the substance of the resolution offered by Senator Sanders and cosponsored by Senator Murphy, me, and others is simple. It puts our war against the Houthi rebels to a vote. It concerns the Houthis and only the Houthis. If Members are convinced that our fight against the Houthis is worthwhile, then so be it. Congress will have done its part and the fight will go on, but if Members are not willing to pay the heavy pricetag for this war, calculated in dollars and in innocent human lives, then our resolution will bring U.S. operations to a close.

This resolution is an opportunity for Members of Congress to stand up and be counted on a matter of life and death. It is an opportunity to end the Executive's unconstitutional dominance over matters of war and peace and restore in its place a collaborative process whereby Congress declares war and Presidents wage war.

I thank Senator Sanders.

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