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[Page H70]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
PRESIDENT NEEDS TO MAKE THE CASE FOR MILITARY ACTION
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from
Massachusetts (Mr. Kennedy) for 5 minutes.
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. Speaker, young men and women enlisting in our
military for the first time will enter recruitment offices across our
country this year.
On their IDs will be birth dates that reflect the fact that they are
signing up to fight in wars that started before they were born.
Nineteen years. That is how long we have been in Afghanistan.
Seventeen years. That is how long we have been in Iraq. Not to mention
the American weapons, the American dollars, the American boots, the
American lives that have been sent to Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and many,
many other corners of our globe.
{time} 1030
We are a generation that has spent the better part of its life at war
in a country in the Middle East, perpetual wars fought under the cover
of two permission slips that this body gave the executive branch nearly
20 years ago.
In 2001, Congress authorized our offensive against al-Qaida and the
Taliban in the wake of 9/11 in what became the largest armed conflict
in American history. In 2002, Congress authorized the invasion of Iraq,
and it became the greatest foreign policy mistake of a generation.
And our response has been silence, silence from this collective body;
silence as we have sent hundreds of thousands of American men and women
to Afghanistan and tens of thousands more to Iraq; silence as three
administrations, Democratic and Republican, have used these two
authorizations to expand, to evolve, to justify, and to prolong our
presence in a volatile and violent region; and silence as our role has
become less clear and our mission less certain.
What we have lost in this silence is hard to quantify--the lives that
could have been spared, the families we could have protected, the money
we could have used to do good, and the credibility we could have saved
if we had summoned the collective courage to tear up those permission
slips.
The vote today on the War Powers Resolution to restrict the current
administration's actions against Iran is an important one. It is a
necessary response to a reckless President without a plan. But it is
not enough because, yesterday, this administration told us that the
legal authority to launch a strike targeting Iran 6 days ago was
granted based on the authority that this body allowed to invade Iraq 18
years ago, using a deceased dictator to justify a potential war against
an entirely different adversary, making a mockery of matters of war and
peace.
So now, facing the threat of war with a different yet brutal regime,
this body must finally act to cut off any avenue that this President or
any other President has to enter our people into a war that we do not
want because this isn't just about the actions of a current
administration. It is about the precedent that we set from this day
forward.
We must pass a War Powers Resolution today. We must repeal the 2001
and 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force. We must compel the
executive branch to come to Congress and make the case that any
military action that is required to protect American lives is in our
best interests and justified.
And we in Congress must be prepared to take some tough votes because
that is our job. It is the very least that we owe our men and women in
uniform putting their lives on the line so the rest of us might sleep
safe and free.
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