Housing for the 21st Century Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. President, we are at war once again. George W. Bush had his Iraq war, and Donald Trump now has his Iran war.

Make no mistake, with the massive deployment of American military forces, with the massive amounts of ordnance that are being used, with the tragic loss of six lives--six servicemembers of the United States-- we are at war.

We are at war, having had no national debate of whether we should enter into war. We are at war, having had no authorization by Congress--a power explicitly given by our Founders to the Congress to declare war. The Founders understood that the executive branch, acting alone, would grow too fond of war. We are seeing that fear materialize before our eyes with a President who now has used military force repeatedly against different countries with different rationales.

Why should we care whether there is a vote in Congress on war? Why should we care whether there is a debate in the country over war?

We should care because, if we vest the sole power to make war in the President of the United States--the sole decision to bring a country into war with the President of the United States--there is no check on the use of that authority; there is no check on the abuse of that authority; there is no meaningful way to constrain a President from getting involved in adventurism around the world that causes our country an enormous price to pay in lives lost, in treasure lost.

Now, you might say: Well, what about these other uses of military force by others in the past? Well, of course, with the Iraq war, there was a vote on authorization. With the Afghanistan war, there was a vote on authorization. But what about these other uses? Doesn't a President have a right to use force to defend the country from imminent attack?

The answer is yes. If there is an imminent threat of attack, the President has the authority. But if it goes beyond anything imminent, he must come to Congress for an authorization.

So what was the imminent threat here? Well, the short answer is, there was none. But the administration has given several shifting rationales--several incompatible arguments--of why they believe there was an imminent threat.

Let's look at Secretary Rubio, last week, who said that the Iranians were headed in the pathway to, one day, being able to develop weapons that could reach the continental United States.

Well, a threat to reach the United States, one day in the future, is the very antithesis of ``imminent.''

Donald Trump said, on Monday, that the regime had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America.

By ``soon,'' the best estimates are that it would take years. That is certainly not imminent.

Secretary Rubio, on Monday, had this to say:

There absolutely was an imminent threat . . . We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.

He said:

We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties . . . We knew that if Iran was attacked, even by someone else, they would immediately come after us and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.

So, on Monday, Rubio says, because Israel was going to attack, we had to preemptively attack.

But on Tuesday, the President contradicted his own Secretary of State and said: ``We were having negotiations with these lunatics''--meaning the Iranians. ``It was my opinion that they''--meaning Iran--``were going to attack first. They were going to attack if we didn't do it. . . . If anything''--the President said--``I might have forced Israel's hand, but Israel was ready.''

So the President says, no, the imminence didn't come from Israel, and that he may have, in fact, forced Israel's hand.

On Tuesday, Hegseth took sides with the President and not Marco Rubio, saying that Trump's explanation was ``100 percent correct.''

OK, so the imminent threat didn't come from anything that Israel was planning to do. It didn't come from missiles that could hit the United States that were years away.

What was the other imminent rationale that the administration used?

Well, on February 21, Steven Witkoff said that Iran is ``probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb making material.''

Of course, that contradicts what the President said last June, with the first Iran war, in which he said and reiterated, just this past Saturday, that ``we obliterated the regime's nuclear program.''

Well, either we obliterated it or we didn't; and if we obliterated it, it is obviously not an imminent threat.

On Monday, Secretary Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon that the Islamic Republic was building sophisticated missiles and other conventional weapons to shield its plans for a nuclear bomb.

Iran had a conventional gun to our head as they tried to lie their way to a nuclear bomb.

Again, there was no evidence that Iran was on the cusp of a missile that could hit the United States, no evidence that Iran was building the mechanism of a bomb, and no evidence of imminence.

What about regime change? Is that somehow a rationale for war at all, let alone war without an authorization by the American people and Congress?

Donald Trump, in 2016, had this to say about regime change. He said:

We must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change.

Earlier in 2025, Donald Trump said:

Regime change takes chaos and, ideally, we don't want to see so much chaos.

But, on Saturday, Donald Trump said:

When we are finished, take over your government.

He said this to the Iranian people.

It will be yours to take. . . . Take back your country.

On Monday, Secretary Rubio said:

We would love to see this regime be replaced.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump said ``someone from within'' the Iranian regime might be the best choice to take over.

But regime change is not an argument that we face as an imminent threat.

Finally, the last rationale of the administration's was on Saturday, when the President posted on Truth Social that ``Iran tried to interfere in [the] 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with [the] United States.''

On Sunday, he cited Iran's effort to assassinate him as a key factor in ordering the operation that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. ``I got him before he got me,'' Trump told ABC News. ``I got him first.''

So this was, I guess, the final rationale. He is the one to get the Iranians before they got him.

So here we are with this shifting series of incoherent rationales-- none of them amounting to imminence, none of them posing a direct and imminent threat to the United States. Now we are at war again, where we have tragically lost the lives of American servicemembers, where we are sinking billions and billions of dollars again into a foreign war without a time constraint, without a plan. This comes at great cost to the American people, most particularly to our military families.

But we are about to get a request for a supplemental appropriation, probably in the tens of billions of dollars, to backfill all the munitions we are using today. That is tens of billions of dollars that will not go into your healthcare. That is tens of billions of dollars that will not go to reducing the cost of your housing or your groceries. That is tens of billions of dollars that will not go into investing in America. That is tens of billions of dollars that we are literally blowing up over Iran when we face no imminent threat.

Folks, we have already, essentially, walked away from our most important power, and that is the congressional power of the purse. The President rescinds funds, and he impounds funds, and we put up no murmur of protest. We have walked away from that most important power in the Constitution that the Founders gave us.

The other most important power they gave us is the power to declare war. There is no argument that this is anything less than war. This resolution is about stopping that war, but it is also about reasserting Congress' vital role as a check on the Executive and on the abuse of the authority to bring a nation to war.

This is about whether the American people, through their elected representatives, will have a say when their sons and daughters are put in harm's way, when the resources of this country are diverted away from their communities and toward the building of bombs and weapons and engagement in another potentially endless foreign war.

I thank Senator Kaine for this resolution, and I am proud to work with him on this. I urge all of my colleagues to support it.

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