Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak on the pending nomination of Mike Pompeo to be the Secretary of State. As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, I opposed the nomination in committee, and I will oppose it on the floor.

I have said publicly that this was not an open-and-shut case for me. Frankly, I would submit that I have probably voted for more of the President's nominees who have come before the Senate than have many of my colleagues. I do believe in giving a substantial amount of deference to the President in the choices that he makes of those who are to serve him in his administration. There have been a number of applicants for Cabinet posts whom I have supported even though I have had grave misgivings about the policies that they were going to be articulating and that they were going to be carrying out.

I also believe Director Pompeo when he talks about the morale crisis at the Department of State and his sincere desire to try to remedy that and address it. There was a morale crisis at the Department of State after Secretary Tillerson waged an assault on diplomats in his trying to push out as many as he could for over a year, changing work requirements to make it harder for people to live in very difficult places around the world and continuing a hiring freeze well past the point at which it was justified. There are a lot of people who serve in this country here in Washington and abroad who need to be told that their work is valuable again, and I believe Mike Pompeo when he talks about the need to try to engage in that morale-building project.

I think there are check marks on the side of the ledger that would argue for Mike Pompeo's confirmation, but I am going to vote no because, unfortunately, I think there are far more check marks on the other side of the ledger.

I want to talk today about the issue of qualifications. I don't argue with the fact that our choices, as those in the Senate, when it comes to those who are picked for the Cabinet, shouldn't really be about policy differences. Sometimes the policy differences will be so serious that Members of the President's opposing party may have to cast a ``no'' vote. By and large, I do think that we should be evaluating candidates based on their qualifications and based on whether their views are at least between the 20-yard lines, within the mainstream conversation about the portfolio of issues that they are going to undertake to oversee.

So I want to talk today about my belief that Director Pompeo is not qualified to be our next Secretary of State. I think that is the appropriate conversation for us to be having, and I want to talk about it through the prism of three qualifications that I would argue any Secretary of State has to meet.

One is that a Secretary of State who is going to be advising the President on matters of war and peace and on questions of military operations overseas has to believe in his heart or in her heart in the Constitution--in the separation of powers between the executive and the legislative branches--when it comes to war-making.

The second is that a Secretary of State has to believe in the value of diplomacy. The Secretary of State is in the national security cabinet in order to represent diplomatic pathways out of very complicated, vexing, and dangerous problems around the globe. You need a Secretary of State who truly believes that diplomacy can be a viable path out of very complicated problems.

Third, you need a Secretary of State who is free of prejudice or who is free of a substantial association with prejudice. This is our Nation's chief diplomat, who is going to be representing the United States all over the world, who is going to try to build bridges between our country and those countries with different cultures, different faiths, different backgrounds, and different ways of viewing the world.

On these three tests, I don't believe that Director Pompeo measures up. Let me talk about each one of them very briefly.

The first is this belief in the separation of powers. If we aren't standing up for article I powers, no one else will. The Founding Fathers were very clear that when it came to military engagement outside of the United States, it was the Congress and only the Congress that had the ability to declare war. Now, admittedly, war is a much fuzzier concept today than it was when armies were marching against each other in open fields and when neat, tidy peace treaties were wrapping up those hostilities. So I will grant my colleagues that declarations of war are a little bit harder today when the enemies never seem to go away and the definition of ``hostilities'' is a little different than it used to be.

Yet, at the hearing, I asked a series of questions of Director Pompeo, whose answers did not leave me with any confidence that he understood that there still must be some places in which only the Congress can declare hostilities. Now, I don't believe the President has the ability to take military action against the Syrian regime without having the authorization of Congress. Apparently, there are members of the President's Cabinet who believe the same thing. Media reports suggest that Secretary Mattis counseled the President to go to Congress first before attacking the Syrian regime.

So I queried Director Pompeo about this topic. I asked him whether there was any attack that had been launched against the United States from the Syrian regime. His answer was no.

I asked him whether there was any threat of imminent attack from the Syrian regime against the United States. His answer was no.

I then asked him what the authorization was that allowed the President to take this action. His answer was ``article II authority,'' which is kind of a blanket answer for anybody in an administration who doesn't have an answer.

I submit that the Obama administration occasionally relied on article II authority as well, but I tried to give Director Pompeo a way out of that overly broad answer.

I asked: Would you identify for me one limiting factor on this broad claim of article II authority. He could not. He could not articulate one definable, articulated restraint on article II military authority before the Foreign Relations Committee.

It speaks to what, I think, is a belief inside this administration, which is now being buoyed by people like Director Pompeo and John Bolton, that the President has virtually unlimited authority to begin military operations overseas. If you can attack the Syrian regime without having any authorization from Congress, then why couldn't the President launch a military attack against North Korea without going to Congress in the way that John Bolton had recommended in some of his writings before joining the administration?

If a Secretary of State is not prepared to argue that the Constitution requires that authority and cannot even articulate a single restraint on a seemingly limitless power under article II to launch attacks overseas without going to Congress, then who is making that argument?

I think a Secretary of State has to have an understanding of the limits of executive power overseas. I don't think Director Pompeo has that belief. Otherwise, he would have answered very differently the questions that he was given in his confirmation hearing.

Secondly, I believe that a baseline qualification to be the Secretary of State, to be the Nation's chief diplomat, is to believe in the fundamental power of diplomacy. Over and over, primarily when he was a Congressman, Director Pompeo showed us that he didn't think much of American diplomatic power. He opposed the JCPOA, which is, of course, a mainstream opinion within the Republican Party, but he did so because he thought that military action would involve just a few thousand sorties--American planes flying over Iran, bombing the country into submission. I think that is a pretty naive, uneducated view of how a war with Iran would go down, but it demonstrates an enthusiasm for military options ahead of diplomatic options, the kind that may be better suited for the Department of Defense than for the Department of State.

He has further cheered on this President as he has pulled out of the Paris climate accords, as he has attacked multilateral alliances that the United States has long been a part of. This is a candidate for Secretary of State who has a long history of critiquing and criticizing diplomatic paths to solving complicated problems around the world.

I want a cheerleader for diplomacy at the Department of State. We have been missing that for the last 1\1/2\ years with Secretary Tillerson. It doesn't seem we are going to remedy that. I think a qualification for Secretary of State is to be a cheerleader for diplomacy. That has not been the reputation or the record of Mike Pompeo.

Lastly, I think you need to be free of prejudice or free of substantial association with prejudice, and the reason for this qualification is self-evident. This is the member of the administration who is going to be most often overseas meeting with leaders that come from very different backgrounds, who believe different things than Americans do, who practice different religions than the majority of Americans do, who have different traditions than the majority of Americans do. So one has to have a respect, right? One has to have a love of other people who come from different faiths and different traditions if you are going to take this job.

This may be the blackest mark on Director Pompeo's record because there is a vast network all across this country that engages in a kind of Islamophobia, a hatred and bigotry toward the Muslim faith that is completely un-American but is also deeply antithetical to American national security interests because if we really want to make this country safe, then we have to be building constant active bridges to Muslim communities in the United States and to our Muslim partners around the world. When you trade in Islamophobia, a fear of Muslims, you are adding bulletin board material to recruiters who want to write a story about how America is at war with the East, how America is at war with the Islamic faith.

For much of his congressional career, Mike Pompeo was deeply intertwined with this network of anti-Muslim organizations. There is a really interesting study that I hope some of you will take a look at that details this network of organizations. They have fairly innocuous- sounding names, like the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, the Middle East Forum, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Jihad Watch, ACT for America, the Center for Security Policy, the Society of Americans for National Existence. Those sound like things I might be for, but if you really take a look at what they do, they preach intolerance. They try to tell Americans that all Muslims are out to get them and that we are better off if we just shelter ourselves from people of the Muslim faith. That makes us less safe, and it morally weakens us as a nation. It is not coincidental that all of these groups sprang up or began to receive substantial funding after Barack Obama became President of the United States. It wasn't coincidental that as Donald Trump was going on cable news casting doubt on whether the President of the United States was really an American citizen or whether he was a secret Kenyan citizen planted in the United States that all of these organizations started to take root. They gained legitimacy because American political leaders associated themselves with their cause because they were able to lure Members of Congress like Mike Pompeo into their web.

Mike Pompeo went on these radio shows that traded in these conspiracy theories about Muslims. He allowed for his name and his office to be associated with their causes. At one point, he actually accepted an award from a group called ACT for America, which is arguably the largest anti-Muslim group in America. They gave him an award saying that ``Representative Mike Pompeo has been a steadfast ally of ours since the day he was elected to Congress.'' This is an organization that the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center classify as a hate group. Their founder said practicing Muslims ``cannot be loyal citizens of the United States.''

Let me say that again. The founder of the group that gave Mike Pompeo an award for being a steadfast ally of their cause said that practicing Muslims cannot be loyal citizens of the United States. These anti- Muslim groups became stronger, became more deeply intertwined into the mainstream because they have allies like Mike Pompeo. It wasn't a coincidence when a Presidential candidate stood up and said: If you elect me, I will ban all Muslims from the United States, that he wasn't laughed off the debate stage. He wasn't laughed off the debate stage because this conspiracy of Islamophobia had penetrated the mainstream because of its access to people like the nominee to be Secretary of State. That is disqualifying to me. That is not about Mike Pompeo's views. It is not about my differences with the policies he is going to espouse as a Secretary of State. That speaks to his qualifications.

This is one of the most important debates we are going to have. These are exceptional times for both Republicans and Democrats, dealing with an administration that conducts itself very differently from others. When it comes down to it, I don't think that by casting a ``no'' vote I am violating the traditions of this body, which have admittedly given deference to the President in some of these choices for Cabinet positions.

I don't think Mike Pompeo really understands the importance of the separation of powers between the Congress and the Executive when it comes to war-making. I don't think this is a Secretary of State who is going to walk into the room when big decisions are being made on foreign policy and argue the diplomacy portfolio. By virtue of his longstanding association with groups that argued values antithetical to a diverse America, arguing that Muslims have no place in this country, I don't think he passes the test when it comes to a Secretary of State who doesn't have an association with prejudice. That would disqualify him from being an effective advocate for us in parts of the world that practice faiths different than ours. So, for those reasons, I am going to be voting no on Mike Pompeo's nomination. At the same time, as I said at the outset, I acknowledge there are arguments for his nomination, and I will hope my fears are unfounded. I will hope that he, if he gets confirmation from this body--which it looks like he will--is an advocate for diplomacy, that he understands the proper role of Congress, and that he represents all Americans when he serves us overseas. I certainly hope that to be the case. I hope I am wrong about my reservations, but I will still cast a ``no'' vote when his nomination comes before the Congress.

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