Housing for the 21st Century Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise today, I believe, as the penultimate speaker before we have a vote on the War Powers Resolution, a bipartisan resolution I filed with Senators Paul, Schiff, and Schumer.

I rise today in support of our troops, who don't deserve to be sent into war unless this Congress votes that there should be such a war.

I pray for the families who are learning that their loved ones will not come home. I pray for the families whose children or spouses are deployed overseas, unable to sleep with worry about them.

Mr. President, I have paid attention over the course of the last 13 months as this President has again and again and again used our troops to carry out military action without coming to Congress. I have paid attention to the reasons that my colleagues are giving who want to give the President an E-ZPass around the Constitution.

When we had a vote last summer about the attack on Iran at the end of the Israeli 12-day war, by the time the vote had been called up, that bombing mission was in the rearview mirror, and so my colleague from Idaho said: There are no hostilities. The hostilities are over, so you should vote against the resolution on that ground.

When we called up an effort to constrain the President from illegally striking boats in international waters, the legal rationale asserted by my colleagues and the White House to vote down a War Powers Resolution and end-run the Constitution was: These are pinprick strikes that don't rise to the level of war. Only if it is war must the White House come to Congress.

When I brought forward a resolution a month or so ago to say no war in Venezuela without a vote of Congress, again my colleague from Idaho said: This isn't war. It is over. It was one and done. There are no troops left in Venezuela.

There has been one reason after the next to give the President an E- ZPass lane around the Constitution.

Well, today, we are dealing with something different. You can't stand up and say this is a pinprick that doesn't lead to the level that would be characterized as war. You can't stand up and say this is one and done and no troops are engaged in hostilities against Iran.

Members of the Senate, this is war. The President of the United States has called it a war against Iran. The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Caine, has called it a war against Iran. Secretary Rubio, our Secretary of State, has called it a war against Iran.

All of the excuses that you have advanced to give the President an E- ZPass around the Constitution and suggest he needn't come to Congress all evaporate because this is a war. It is a war.

Many of my colleagues know that during the classified briefing yesterday--I can't reveal information given to me, but I can say what I said. I challenged the body, including the administration witnesses: Your escalating pattern of military action without seeking approval convinces me that you believe you never need to come to Congress to wage war against anyone anywhere.

I hoped that someone might refute my point and tell me I am wrong and they would come to Congress, but no one did.

So here we are in a war that has cost American lives, that is leading to chaos throughout the region, that threatens to grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And I am asking the Senate to do what the Framers of the Constitution said we should do--debate and vote about matters of war.

What are the arguments now that the other side has made to suggest we should vote down this resolution?

First, they say that Iran are bad actors. On that, we would agree. If you put in a resolution ``Iran has carried out a lot of bad actions,'' you would get a 100-to-zip vote in this body on that resolution. But being a bad actor is not an E-ZPass around the Constitution. It does not allow us to take our sons and daughters into war and risk their lives without a debate and vote. That is not a sufficient rationale.

The other rationale--and you just heard my colleague make it--was that the effort to bring a War Powers Resolution, a bipartisan resolution, before this body is somehow partisan; it is this side trying to come to the aid of the regime.

There is nothing partisan about the Constitution. There is nothing partisan about caring for our kids and wanting to have a debate before they get sent into harm's way to risk their lives.

This is not a partisan issue on our side. We are basically asking a question of the entire Senate--indeed, of the entire Nation: Have we learned nothing from 25 years of war in the Middle East?

Mr. President, 14,000 American troops and contractors were killed in Iran and Afghanistan. More than 65,000 American troops and contractors were injured in these wars. These nearly 80,000 people were from every walk of life, every State and territory, every race, every age, every rank, every religion, every gender. They only have two things in common: A, they had a patriotic desire to serve their country, and B, their futures were dramatically affected--in some instances, eliminated--because of 25 years of war in the Middle East.

Someone suggested yesterday that this resolution was our effort to gum up the work of the--what is the work of the Senate? What is the work of the Senate if it is not to discuss the circumstances under which we should send our kids into war?

In addition to the lives lost of American troops and contractors and those injured, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than $8 trillion was spent that could have been spent on American healthcare, on American housing, on American education--spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and what did we get for it? What did we get for it? If people think 25 years of war in the Middle East was a good thing or produced something, I hope they would come to the floor and tell us what we gained from it.

This effort to force a vote is not about partisanship; it is about the Constitution. But even more importantly, it is about the lives of our troops and the question of what, in fact, we got from 25 years of war in the Middle East and whether we should continue that ``forever war.'' The President tweeted out the phrase ``forever war'' today when he talked about the munitions that we have.

We don't need illegal wars. We don't need forever wars. We don't need more wars in the Middle East.

Let me say this and conclude and yield to our Democratic leader. I have said this to my colleagues before. I came to this body in 2013 with the experience of being a Governor and watched my Virginians repeatedly deployed, time after time after time--Active Duty, Guard, Reserve, DOD civilians, Virginia National Guard--into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I went to the deployments, and I went to the homecomings, and I went to the wakes, and I went to the funerals, and I signed the condolence letters that all Governors sign when they get the bad news that one of their own has lost their lives in war.

And when I came to this body in 2013, I said that I would do anything I could in my power to stop any President--Democrat or Republican--from waging war without coming to Congress and that I would especially do anything I could to stop an unwise, unnecessary war that puts our troops' lives at risk for no legitimate reason. Colleagues who have been with me since 2013 know that I have upheld that standard against Presidents of both parties. When President Obama wanted to use military action in Syria to punish the Syrian regime for using chemical weapons against its own citizens, even though I was his friend, I stood up and said: You cannot do that without a vote of Congress.

Presidents can defend against incoming attack, protect against Houthis firing at our ships in the Red Sea. Presidents can act when there is a preexisting congressional authorization to go after terrorists who Congress voted the President should be able to act against. But in this instance, there is no congressional authorization on the books that would authorize this military action. And as my colleagues have amply demonstrated, the administration and their shifting set of rationales, and even in a classified setting, could produce no evidence--none--that the United States was under an imminent threat of attack from Iran.

It is easy to try to dismiss this by saying: Oh, it is about partisanship. And those who would say that say it so they don't have to grapple, I believe, with their own sense of unease about what we are starting on right now.

Perhaps this war will be over in a few weeks or a few months. We pray that it will be, but that is what we thought about the war in Iraq when we claimed that the mission was accomplished, when we claimed that we were met as liberators. And yet, years and years and years later, troops from all of our States were still coming home deeply wounded and affected, both physically and in their mental health, from those wars, from seeing what happened to them and their friends. Some never came home.

If there is one thing we do that we have to get right, it is this. It is this. We can't afford to hide under a desk and let any President-- Democrat or Republican--send our best and brightest, our own kids, into war to risk their lives unless we have debated it, we have determined it is in the national interest, we have voted and thereby put our signature and our thumbprint on the notion that it is worth sending our best and brightest to risk their lives.

I urge my colleagues: As this is escalating from pinprick strikes and one-off operations now into full war, even called war by the President and his chief advisers, let's stand up and do what the Constitution requires us to do.

I urge a ``yes'' vote on my resolution.

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