Terminating the National Emergency Declared with Respect to Energy

Floor Speech

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Ms. SLOTKIN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of Senators Schiff and Kaine's resolution regarding war powers.

This resolution would just say very simply that if the Trump administration wants to be at war against a terrorist organization, they should come to Congress, notify us, and seek our approval.

Currently, the administration is waging a secret war against a secret list of unnamed groups that they will not tell us about. There have been four lethal strikes against boats in the Caribbean. The administration wrote us a letter--wrote this body a letter--about what they were doing in September. They said they considered themselves to be in a ``non-international armed conflict''--that means a war--against a secret list of ``designated terrorist organizations.''

I received a briefing last week on the administration's strikes in the Caribbean. During that briefing, Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, from both sides of the aisle, asked a Senate- confirmed official whether the Department of Defense could produce a list of the organizations that are now considered terrorists by the United States. They said they could not provide that list.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am a CIA officer. I am a former Pentagon official. I did three tours in Iraq--armed--alongside the military. I participated in the targeting of terrorist groups. I actually have no real problem going against cartels, given what they have done in their inserting drugs in our community and with the death of so many Americans. But as a nation, I think we should have as a basic principle that you can't have a secret list of terrorist organizations that the American public and, certainly, the U.S. Congress don't get to even know the names of.

The problem for me is that this is unprecedented. You know, during the Global War on Terror, which is kind of my era, it was very clear. Terrorist organizations would be notified. If we wanted to declare a new terrorist organization, it would be notified to Congress. Then our intelligence community, the military, and law enforcement would spin up to go after information about that group and prosecute--you know, target against that group. But that is not what is going on today, and we will not understand, apparently, the dozens of terrorist organizations that we have now named until we understand their names.

This is important in the foreign context, right? This is unprecedented in terms of what we have done against foreign adversaries, against foreign terrorist organizations; but what I want to draw people's attention to is the implication for what is happening inside of our own country.

In September--also last month--the Trump administration put out a new Executive order about domestic terrorist organizations. They said that they were going to, again, make secret lists of ``terrorist groups'' inside the United States and send the full force of the U.S. Government against those terrorist organizations. They are not telling anyone the name of these organizations, but they are authorizing law enforcement and the intelligence community to double down and come up with that list.

This is a problem because the Trump administration defined in that document a ``terrorist organization'' or ``domestic terrorism'' incredibly broadly. It suggests that any group that talks about anti- Christian values, views they don't like on migration or race, differing views on the role of the family, religion, or morality could all be grounds for labeling an organization ``domestic terrorists.''

If this administration is not telling us who is on their secret designated terrorist list for groups in the Caribbean, they are definitely not going to tell us who is on their list of domestic terrorist organizations.

We saw, to start us off, the attorney general down in Texas put out publicly that he is now going to launch a campaign against domestic terrorist organizations in his own State. So it has begun.

Meanwhile, we know what is going on in some of our American cities. Trump said that he would invoke, potentially, the Insurrection Act of 1807. He has made more than 800 of our military generals fly in from across the world and talked about going after the ``enemy from within''--his words--and making American towns and cities their ``training grounds'' for the military.

This is important, and I think every American should understand what it means if the President of the United States follows through with what he said and says--that he is now invoking the Insurrection Act. That means--a certain city--if the violence has gotten to a level of an insurrection, it means that the U.S. military can now be used as law enforcement in our cities. It means the U.S. military can raid; they can arrest; they can detain. You can easily see a world where the President of the United States labels protest groups ``terrorists,'' doesn't tell anyone, and creates an excuse to unilaterally use the military inside our cities, similar to the way he used them in the Caribbean.

Just to be clear, this is straight out of an authoritarian playbook where the President gets to play judge, jury, and executioner. This time, instead of stopping drug traffickers, it will be stopping Americans potentially from exercising their right to freedom of speech.

This is not theoretical, using the U.S. military in our streets. It is not something that the President hasn't already thought about. We know that in the first Trump administration, the President called up his Secretary of Defense and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs because he was upset about protests that were going on in front of the White House. Mark Esper was the Secretary of Defense. He wrote about this in his book called ``A Sacred Oath,'' and he talked about some of the things President Trump asked him to do.

President Trump wanted him to send in not the National Guard but the 82nd Airborne--an Active-Duty military unit, one of our most elite, a large unit--to quell protests here in Washington, DC. He asked for them to be moved into the city. And when the back-and-forth happened with former Secretary Esper, President Trump asked him point blank: ``Can't you just shoot them in the legs or something?''

I want to just flag for everybody that we are seeing a repeat of that story but in exponentially more gruesome detail play out right now. The President is looking for an excuse to send the U.S. military into our streets, to deploy the U.S. military against his own people, to prompt confrontation, and to hope that confrontation justifies even more military force and military control.

This is a well-worn authoritarian playbook. It is one that quite literally the United States of America was founded on rejecting--the idea that the British soldiers, when they occupied American cities, abused American citizens to the point where Americans turned against them.

I am a former CIA officer, a former Pentagon official. I have worked alongside the military my entire life. I cannot stomach the idea that the American people would fear the uniformed military who have given their lives to protect them for so many years.

But all of us in this Chamber and certainly those of us who have served in the past swore an oath to the Constitution--not to a King, not to a party, not to any one person. Nobody gets to rewrite the Constitution--not a President, not an adviser, no one.

If the President wants to use force abroad or at home, he needs to come to this body and explain it publicly to the American public.

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