AUMF

Floor Speech

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Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President. I would like to touch on two topics. The
first is that today the President has submitted a request for
authorization for use of military force with regard to ISIL, or ISIS,
as some call it.

First, I think it is good news that the President has made that
submission, and I think he is right when he says the country is
stronger when both Congress and the President act together.

I would say there is a pretty simple authorization he could ask for,
and it would be one sentence, and that is, ``We authorize the President
to defeat and destroy ISIL.'' And that is what I think we need to do.

I look forward to reading through his submission. I understand it
contains a time limitation. It does not contain geographic limitations.
It contains some language that supposedly will make people feel more
comfortable about the use of ground troops.

An authorization to use force that has limitations built into it is
really quite unprecedented. We did some research, and the Congressional
Research Service said that there really were only two previous
authorizations that have limited the President in terms of the use of
force to be used or the duration of the conflict. One was in 1983 in
Lebanon, and one was in 1993 in Somalia. Both of those were
peacekeeping missions, so it made sense to limit the peacekeeping
mission to use of force. But it appears that never before in certainly
modern history has the Congress of the United States authorized the
President to take on and defeat an enemy but has done so with
limitations on the time or geography or anything of that nature. That
is an important point for us to understand because under no
circumstances can ISIL stay. What we need to be authorizing the
President to do is to destroy them and to defeat them and allow the
Commander in Chief--both the one we have now and the one who will
follow--to put in place the military tactics necessary to destroy and
defeat ISIS.

It is important to point out that circumstances on the ground might
rapidly change. They already have. For example, when this began--if you
look back a year and a half ago, if I had stood on the floor and given
a speech about defeating ISIL or ISIS, no one would have known what I
was talking about because at the time most Americans and most Members
of Congress had no idea what that was. That is how quickly this has
developed into a threat.

I would remind everyone that when they actually crossed over from
Syria into Iraq, the President called them the JV team. Even today the
facts on the ground continue to evolve very rapidly. For example, we
now know through open source reports that ISIL has now established a
presence in Derna, Libya, which gives them access to a port facility,
and it is a completely uncontested space. There is no government
shooting at them. There are no airstrikes. There is no one coming after
them there. They can do whatever they want in Libya, and they are doing
it. They are using it as a place to train, a place to recruit, a place
to resupply, a place to raise money, and they have access to a port
that allows them to bring all these things in.

There have also been open source reports of groups in Afghanistan
beginning to pledge allegiance to ISIS. In fact, in at least four
different countries in north Africa, there are now groups who have
pledged allegiance to ISIL. So while we continue to focus on the
conflict with relation to Iraq and Syria, we cannot overlook the fact
that they are sprouting affiliates throughout the entire region.

I think that after the brutal murder of numerous Americans--we saw
last week what happened to the Jordanian pilot--I don't have to spend
much time convincing people how dangerous this group is. What we don't
hear enough about is the atrocities being committed on a daily basis on
the ground, what they are doing to the Sunni population, for example,
of areas they have now conquered, the brutality, the way they enforce
sharia law with brutal tactics, not to mention the brutal stories we
have heard of women being sold off or given away as brides to ISIL
fighters, children trafficked into slavery, entire populations
slaughtered, and fighters who were captured and killed in mass
killings. This is what this group envisions for the world.

The goals of this group are not simply to govern what we knew once as
Iraq or Syria or Libya or any other country; their ultimate goal is for
the entire world--including where we stand today--to one day live under
their mandate, under the rules they have established, under their
radical version of Sunni Islam. You may say that is far-fetched, and it
may be today, but that is their clear ambition--to spread their form of
radical Islam everywhere and anywhere they can. They openly talk about
this.

This group needs to be defeated. I wish we had taken this group on
earlier. I wish, in fact, that we had gotten involved in the conflict
in Syria earlier and equipped moderate rebel elements, non-jihadist
rebel elements on the ground so that they would have been the most
powerful force there. The President failed to do that in a timely
fashion, and as a result a vacuum was created, and that vacuum was
filled by this group who has attracted foreign fighters from all over
the world to join their ranks.

Now we are dealing with this problem, but I would argue better late
than never. Had we dealt with this a year and a half ago or 2 years
ago, it wouldn't have been easy, but it would have been easier. But it
is important to deal with it decisively now. We can debate the tactics,
but it is the job of the Commander in Chief, in consultation with his
military officials who surround him and advise him, to come up with the
appropriate tactics to defeat the enemy.

For our purposes--very straightforward--ISIL is the enemy. They need
to be defeated, and we should authorize this President and future
Presidents to do what they can and what they must to defeat ISIS and
erase them from the equation.

Venezuela

Mr. President, I also wish to take a moment to talk a little bit
about what is happening in Venezuela. Tomorrow, February 12, will mark
the 1-year anniversary since students and others across Venezuela took
to the streets in peaceful demonstrations and demanded a better
government and a better future than the current one, which is corrupt
and incompetent and provides no leadership to the country.

Tomorrow also marks the 1-year anniversary since the Venezuelan
Government, under Nicolas Maduro, responded with a violent crackdown
that left dozens of people dead, thousands injured, and hundreds in
jail as political prisoners. There have been at least 50 documented
cases of torture by government forces on peaceful demonstrators, and more than 1,700 individuals await trial today in Venezuela before a judiciary that is completely
controlled by Maduro's government. This includes Leopoldo Lopez, who
has been languishing in the Ramo Verde prison for almost a year.

In the year since the people took to the streets demanding more
opportunity, accountability, and more freedom, the basic necessities
have vanished from the shelves. It is one of the richest nations in the
hemisphere, and its economy is in shambles.

Venezuela is also plagued with one of the world's highest murder
rates, rampant corruption related to state assets, a 57-percent
inflation rate, a junk rating on the global bond market, and
unprecedented scarcity of goods as basic as toilet paper. Lately,
things have gotten so bad in Venezuela under Maduro that they are no
longer just kidnapping people. As the Diario las Americas, which is a
newspaper in Miami, reported earlier this week, people are now
kidnapping dogs and other pets in Venezuela and holding them for
ransom. That is how bad things have gotten.

Why is this happening? Why has the cradle of Latin American
independence--a country blessed with oil and energy wealth, with
talented and hard-working people--become a failed state?

For starters, because it is modeling its economy after Cuba, which
itself is a failed state.

Second, for years Venezuela has been in the grips of incompetent
buffoons, one after another. First it was Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas
Maduro. They have squandered the nation's riches.

Third, the country is being run by corrupt individuals. Just last
week reports came out alleging that the speaker of the national
assembly, Diosdado Cabello, is himself a drug kingpin.

Fourth, even with all the oil wealth Venezuela has squandered, it
still possesses some of the largest oil reserves on the planet, but oil
prices are dropping. In a country such as Venezuela where innovation
and entrepreneurship are stifled, where wealth and power are
concentrated in the government and its cronies, the entire economy is
the oil industry. Ninety-six percent of Venezuela's export revenues
come from oil.

So I am proud that in December the Senate and the House passed and
the President signed a bill that sanctions human rights violators in
Venezuela. It mandates that their assets be frozen and visa
restrictions be placed upon them if they are involved in human rights
violations. That is going to be critical going forward. As things get
worse, more people in Venezuela will take to the streets, and the
national guard in the country--which is nothing but armed thugs working
on behalf of the Maduro government--will be tempted to crack down on
people violently. So our legislation would impose visa sanctions and
asset sanctions on individuals responsible for these human rights
violations.

The good news is that the President has moved forward with some of
these visa restrictions, and that is a very positive step. America
should not be and cannot be a playground for Venezuela's human rights
violators. But the financial sanctions part of the bill are long
overdue. They are urgently needed because things are only going to get
worse in Venezuela. People are only going to get more desperate. They
are only going to speak out more. They are only going to demand freedom
more. And I suspect, although I hope I am wrong, that the response from
the Venezuelan Government will be more violence and more crackdowns on
the people of their own nation.

If, God forbid, they use lethal force against their own people--which
is a right they have reserved for themselves, a right the government
has approved and has given authority to the national guard to use--we
cannot simply stand by and watch as innocent people are killed or
injured because the regime believes there will be no consequences.

So today I wanted to come here for a few moments and urge the
President to do what I asked him to do in a letter last week, and that
is to not sit idly by on the Venezuelan sanction law he signed last
year but to use it--to use it immediately and decisively to make clear
that the United States of America will not stand for repression taking
place in Venezuela and that we will use the tools of our economy and
the power we have given the President to punish those responsible for
committing human rights violations in Venezuela against the people of
that great nation.

Thank you, Mr. President.

With that, I yield the floor.

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