[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 5 (Thursday, January 9, 2020)]
[House]
[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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