Time for Congress to Authorize War in Iraq and Syria
Floor Speech
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, today, along with my colleagues Walter Jones of North Carolina and Barbara Lee of California, I introduced House Concurrent Resolution 55 in order to force this House and this Congress to debate on whether U.S. troops should withdraw from Iraq and Syria. We introduced this resolution under the provisions of section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution.
As all of my House colleagues know, last year, the President authorized airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria on August 7. For over 10 months, the United States has been engaged in hostilities in Iraq and Syria without debating an authorization for this war.
On February 11 this year, nearly 4 months ago, the President sent to Congress the text for an Authorization for Use of Military Force, or an AUMF, on combating the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, yet Congress has failed to act on that AUMF, or bring an alternative to the House floor, even though we continue to authorize and appropriate the money required for sustained military operations in those countries.
Frankly speaking, Mr. Speaker, this is unacceptable. This House appears to have no problem sending our uniformed men and women into harm's way. It appears to have no problem spending billions of dollars for the arms, equipment, and air power to carry out these wars. But it just can't bring itself to step up to the plate and take responsibility for these wars.
Our servicemen and servicewomen are brave and dedicated. Congress, however, is the poster child for cowardice. The leadership of this House whines and complains from the sidelines, and all the while it shirks its constitutional duties to bring an AUMF to the floor of this House, debate it, and vote on it.
Our resolution, which will come before this House for consideration in 15 calendar days, requires the President to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and Syria within 30 days or no later than the end of this year, December 31, 2015. If this House approves this resolution, Congress would still have 6 months in which to do the right thing and bring an AUMF before the House and the Senate for debate and for action. Either Congress needs to live up to its responsibilities and authorize this war, or by its continuing neglect and indifference, our troops should be withdrawn and come home. It is that simple.
I am deeply, I am deeply troubled by our policy in Iraq and Syria. I do not believe it is a clearly defined mission with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but rather just more of the same. I am not convinced that by enlarging our military footprint, that we will somehow end the violence in the region, defeat the Islamic State, or address the underlying causes of the unrest. It is a complicated situation that requires a complicated and more imaginative response.
I am also concerned by recent statements by the administration about how long we will be engaged in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere fighting the Islamic State. Just yesterday, on June 3, General John Allen, the U.S. envoy for the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIL, said that this fight may take ``a generation or more.'' He was speaking in Doha, Qatar, at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum.
Mr. Speaker, I will insert for the Record a Times of Israel article entitled, ``Islamic State Fight May Take `Generation or More'--US Envoy.''
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, if we are going to invest a generation or more of our blood and our treasure in this war, then shouldn't Congress at least debate whether or not to authorize it?
According to the National Priorities Project, based in Northampton, Massachusetts, which is in my congressional district, every single hour the taxpayers of the United States are paying $3.42 million for military actions against the Islamic State--$3.42 million every hour, Mr. Speaker.
This is on top of the hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent on the first war in Iraq. And nearly every single penny of this war chest was borrowed money, put on the national credit card, provided as so-called emergency funds that don't have to be accounted for or subject to budget caps like all other funds.
Why is it, Mr. Speaker, that we always seem to have plenty of money or the will to borrow all the money it takes to carry out wars? But somehow, we never have any money to invest in our schools, our highways and water systems, or our children, families, and communities? Every day, every single day, this Congress is forced to make tough, serious, painful decisions to deprive our domestic economy and priorities of the resources they need to succeed. But somehow, there is always money for more wars.
Well, if we are going to continue to spend billions on war, and if we are going to continue to tell our Armed Forces that we expect them to fight and die in these wars, then it seems to me the least we can do is stand up and vote to authorize these wars, or we should end them. We owe that to the American people. We owe that to our troops and their families. And we owe that to the oath of office that each of us took to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
I want to be clear, Mr. Speaker: I can no longer criticize the President, the Pentagon, or the State Department when it comes to taking responsibility for this war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. I may not agree with the policy, but they have done their duty. At every step of the way, beginning on June 16, 2014, the President has informed Congress of his actions to send U.S. troops to Iraq and Syria and to carry out military operations against the Islamic State. And on February 11 of this year, he sent to Congress the draft text of an AUMF.
Mr. Speaker, while I disagree with the policy, the administration has done its job. It has kept the Congress informed, and as military operations continue to escalate, they sent an AUMF to the Congress for action.
It is this Congress, this House, that has failed and failed miserably to carry out its duties. Always complaining from the sidelines, the leadership of this House failed to act last year to authorize this war, even as it escalated and expanded nearly every month. The Speaker said it wasn't the responsibility of the 113th Congress to act, even though the war started during its tenure. No, no. Somehow it was the responsibility of the next Congress, the 114th Congress.
Well, the 114th Congress convened on January 6, and it still hasn't done a single, solitary thing to authorize the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The Speaker asserted that Congress couldn't act on the war until the President sent an AUMF to Congress. Well, Mr. Speaker, the President did just that on February 11, and still the leadership of this House has done nothing to authorize the use of military force in Iraq and Syria. And now the Speaker is saying he wants the President to send Congress another version of the AUMF because he doesn't like the first one. Are you kidding me?
Well, I am sorry, Mr. Speaker, it doesn't work that way. If the leadership of this House doesn't like the original text of the President's AUMF, then it is the job of Congress to draft an alternative, report that revised AUMF out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, bring it to the floor of the House, and let the Members of this House debate and vote on it. That is how it works.
If you think that the President's AUMF is too weak, then you make it stronger. If you think that it is too expansive, then set limits on it. If you are opposed to these wars, then vote to bring our troops home. That is what we are here to do. That is what we are charged to do under the Constitution. And that is why Members of Congress get a paycheck from the American people every week--to make the hard decisions, not run away from them.
All I ask, Mr. Speaker, is that the Congress do its job. That is the duty of this House and of the majority in charge of this House--to simply do its job, to govern, Mr. Speaker. But instead, all we witness is dithering and twiddling and complaining and whining and blaming others, and the complete and total shirking of responsibility over and over and over and over again. Enough, enough.
So with great reluctance and frustration, Representative Jones and Representative Lee and I introduced House Concurrent Resolution 55. Because if this House doesn't have the stomach to carry out its constitutional duty to debate and authorize this latest war, then we should bring our troops home. If the cowardly Congress can go home each night to their families and loved ones, then our brave troops should receive that same privilege.
Doing nothing is easy. And I am sad to say that war has become easy, too easy. But the costs in terms of blood and treasure are very, very, very high.
I urge all of my colleagues to support this resolution and demand that the leadership of this House bring to the floor of this House an AUMF for the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria before Congress adjourns on June 26 for the Fourth of July recess.
Congress needs to debate an AUMF, Mr. Speaker. It needs to do its job.
At this point, Mr. Speaker, I yield to my colleague from North Carolina, Congressman Walter Jones.
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Mr. McGOVERN. I want to thank my colleague from North Carolina for his eloquent statement and for his passion on this issue and for his courage on this issue because I know that it is not easy to stand up and raise some of these questions. He has done so consistently, and I think the country owes him a debt of gratitude, so I thank the gentleman for that.
I think, as Mr. Jones pointed out, there is a constitutional principle at stake here. We have a responsibility when it comes to matters of war, and it is a little bit puzzling to me that we have a lot of complaining in this Chamber by some in saying that the President is not consulting enough with Congress or he is doing too many things with executive actions; yet, when it comes to the issue of war, we don't want to have anything to do with it. It is just too easy to do nothing.
I know that these issues are uncomfortable--they are complicated; they are difficult--but our job is not to run away from an issue if it is uncomfortable. We have to deliberate on a lot of issues that are important to the American people and to the national security of this country.
I don't think it takes any courage for a Member of Congress to be quiet on this issue and cheer the White House on if the military operation is going well or criticize it if it is not, but never have to take a vote. That is not leadership; that is cowardice. That is shirking our responsibility.
I don't care whether you are a Democrat or a Republican. We all, for the sake of protecting the integrity of this institution, should insist that we assume our proper role when it comes to issues of war. War is a big deal. It is a big deal--at least it should be a big deal.
As I said earlier, what bothers me is that, in this Chamber and in this city, it has become easy. We don't talk about it. We had a debate on the defense authorization bill last week. A number of us tried to bring amendments to the floor to kind of force this issue, and we were told this is not the place to talk about the war--the defense authorization bill, which authorizes a lot of the funding for this war.
If that is not the place to talk about it, then where is the place to talk about it? With every attempt that we have launched to try to force a debate on the floor, we have been frustrated. We have been told you can't do it. Here we are in June, and we have been at war now for many, many months. The time has come for us to stand up and be heard on this issue.
Look, I have great reservations about the White House's policy in Iraq and Syria. I don't support much of what the President is doing right now. I know his heart is in the right place, but I don't think that the ultimate answer here is to expand our military footprint. I have reservations.
Even if you believe that you ought to give the President all of the power in the universe to do whatever he wants around the world, you still ought to support what Congressman Jones and Congresswoman Lee and I are trying to do, and that is to make sure that Congress has a role in this, that we authorize whatever action is going to take place from this point forward.
Again, you could vote to expand the President's authority. You could vote to limit the President's authority. You could vote to say we don't believe the President should have any authority to launch even more wars in the Middle East. That is what the debate should be about.
We should be talking about the specifics of our policy. I mean, is there a clearly defined mission here? I don't see it. A clearly defined mission has a beginning, a middle, and an end; but we ought to have that debate.
How does this all end? We were told initially, Oh, it won't be that long; then it was a few years. Now, it is going to be a generation or two. The length of time that we are going to be expected to be engaged here gets longer and longer and longer and longer with each passing month. Isn't that worth a discussion? Isn't that worth a debate?
We debate a lot of things on this House floor that I would say are pretty trivial. We debate a lot of legislation that we know is going nowhere. Why can't we take the time to debate this issue of war? Why can't we take the time to do what is right by our servicemen and -women, who are being put into harm's way, to make sure that we are getting it right with regard to Iraq and Syria and the war against the Islamic State? Again, I know it is uncomfortable; but so what? We need to do our job.
I will just close by reiterating something that Congressman Jones said, and that is that we have a lot of needs here in the United States. We can't get a long-term highway bill passed. We have tens of millions of fellow citizens in the United States of America, the richest country on the planet, who are hungry. We have some schools that are in disrepair.
Quite frankly, our kids deserve a heck of a lot better. We have infrastructure needs. I can go right down the list of the things that we need to do. We have people who are unemployed, and we have people who are homeless. We need more housing for people.
There are so many things that we have to do, and we are told we can't do any of it because we don't have the money; but, when it comes to wars that never end or wars that are going to last generations or more, we are an ATM machine.
If the money is not there, we will give you an IOU. We will put it on our credit card. People talk about the deficit and the debt; yet we are adding all of these billions and trillions of dollars because of these wars that are not paid for. No one says anything about that around here, but that is one of the biggest contributors to our debt. We ought to realize that.
When we talk about national security, I would just say to my colleagues that national security also includes the quality of life for people here in this country, whether people have a job, whether people have access to a good education, whether people have health care, whether people have food, whether they have shelter.
All of those things are important parts of our national security and our national defense. We are neglecting them on a regular basis, but we are spending every cent we have on these wars overseas.
This deserves a debate. Again, we would prefer that an AUMF come before the full House under regular order, where the House Foreign Affairs Committee would report out a bill, and we would just debate it, but we have been patient long enough, and nothing has been forthcoming.
Here we are in June with still no promise that anything may be coming--more excuses. That is why we introduced this privileged resolution. We are going to force a debate, and we are going to force a vote. We will do it again and again and again and again until this Congress lives up to its constitutional responsibilities.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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