Supplemental Appropriations

Floor Speech

SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS -- (Senate - May 01, 2007)

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, tonight is a sad night for America, but what the President's veto indicated was not that Democrats don't want to support the troops--we do--but that he does not want a change in direction, a change in mission, a change in course. It indicates the President is still in his bunker thinking everything is going fine in Iraq, and it clearly isn't.

The bottom line is very simple: We can do two things at once. We can support the troops and at the same time we can change our mission. The bottom line is simple, and that is that the present policies have failed. Everyone except a handful of supporters of the President, and the President and the Vice President themselves, know that, but unfortunately they stubbornly cling to staying on the same course, to the detriment of about everybody else in this country and the world.

The bottom line is very simple: that President Bush, when he asked Americans to go to war, never talked about policing a civil war, and yet that is the largest part of our efforts in Iraq. We on this side of the aisle hope to change that direction so that we are fighting terrorism and directing counterterrorism and not simply policing a civil war.

The next few weeks will be momentous in our history. Frankly, when these few weeks began, the President, with his bully pulpit, his harsh rhetoric, his idea that he was trying to persuade people we didn't support the troops, many thought he would win the fight--the fight here in this Chamber and in the minds of public opinion. But that hasn't happened at all. In fact, the American people are so disgruntled by this war in Iraq, that the old name-calling, the old kneecapping, the old attempts to instill fear in people who disagreed with him don't work for this President anymore. He has only one choice. That choice is a simple one, which is to change the course of the war in Iraq. It is inevitable. It will happen. It will happen sooner or it will happen later, but it must happen because failed policies can never continue on and on and on.

They have asked us to have faith in the surge. If it won't work with 150,000 troops, it won't work with 180,000 troops, and it won't work because the Government in Iraq does not have the support of the people, is unable to accomplish any goals, is unable to bring Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds together. It doesn't matter how many troops we have there; the bottom line is simple. Our President is in the twilight days of his administration, and he has only two choices. One is to do what his predecessor Ronald Reagan did: See that things have gone off course and seek a correction. Ronald Reagan did that in 1986, and by 1988 the wall came down and Ronald Reagan had restored the faith of the American people. Why this President can't see the necessity to do the same when his policies, if anything, are in far worse shape than those of President Reagan, speaks either to an inability to sense what is going on or a stubbornness despite the facts. We can't tolerate that.

We here tonight make a pledge to the American people. We will continue this struggle to change our direction in Iraq. We will not run away from fighting terrorism. We believe it every bit as fervently as anybody else, but we will also not run away from fighting terrorism smartly, which is what we are not doing here.

So we will continue to try to reach a compromise with this President, to try to figure out a way we can both support the troops and change the course of the war in Iraq in maybe a different way, but we will not give up on our mission. The American people demand no less and we will not disappoint them.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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