[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 104 (Tuesday, June 17, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3448-S3451]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
WAR POWERS RESOLUTION
Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise at a late hour with few folks on the
floor to talk about the most serious issue we could ever talk about on
the floor of the U.S. Senate: the prospect that America may soon be in
a war.
There is no part of the Constitution that is more important than the
article I provisions making claim that the United States should not be
at war without a vote of Congress. Yet the news of the day suggests
that we are potentially on the verge of a war with Iran.
When I was elected to the Senate in 2012, having served as a Governor
from 2006 to 2010 during a tremendous upsurge in the two wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, I visited our troops multiple times in the Green Zone
in Baghdad and in Afghanistan. I went to the deployments and the
homecomings; I went to the wakes and funerals, and I told myself when I
came to the Senate that, if I ever had the chance to stop this Nation
from getting into an unnecessary war, I would do everything I could to
stop us from getting into an unnecessary war. I happen to believe that
the United States engaging in a war against Iran--a third war in the
Middle East since 2001--would be a catastrophic blunder for this
country.
I think there are some in this body who have a different point of
view than I on this point, but I think we should all be able to agree
in the fundamental constitutional principle that says we shouldn't be
in a war if Congress doesn't have the guts to debate it and vote on it;
that we should all, in having taken an oath to the Constitution, at
least support the principle that war is something that should be for
Congress to declare.
Just recently--right before I walked on the floor--the New York Times
published this article, and I am just going to read this to demonstrate
the imminence of the threat that this country faces.
The article from the New York Times, dated today, reads ``Iran is
Preparing Missiles for Possible Retaliatory Strikes on U.S. Bases,
Officials Say,'' and I will just read the first few paragraphs.
Iran has prepared missiles and other military equipment for
strikes on U.S. bases in the Middle East should the United
States join Israel's war against the country, according to
American officials who have reviewed intelligence reports.
Fears of a wider war are growing among American officials
as Israel presses the White House to intervene in its
conflict with Iran. If the United States joins the Israeli
campaign and strikes Fordo, a key Iranian nuclear facility,
the Iranian-backed Houthi militia will almost certainly
resume striking ships in the Red Sea, the officials said.
They added that pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria would
probably try to attack U.S. bases there.
Other officials said that in the event of an attack, Iran
could begin to mine the Strait of Hormuz, a tactic meant to
pin American warships in the Persian Gulf. Commanders put
American troops on high alert at military bases throughout
the region, including in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and
Saudi Arabia. The United States has more than 40,000 troops
deployed in the Middle East.
I met the father of an Apache helicopter pilot currently deployed in
Syria yesterday.
Finally, from the article:
Two Iranian officials have acknowledged that the country
would attack U.S. bases in the Middle East, starting with
those in Iraq, if the United States joined Israel's war.
We stand tonight as close to the potential initiation of a third war
in the Middle East--the United States against Iran--as we have been
during my time in the Senate. So, yesterday morning, when the Senate
came into session, I announced and then I followed up with a filing of
a War Powers Resolution in this body--a privileged resolution--that, by
my clock, will mature and be subject to a vote on this floor because of
its privileged status a week from Thursday. Ten days from the filing of
such a motion, even by a single Senator, the Senate is required to take
this matter up for an up-or-down floor vote about whether or not war
should happen without a vote of Congress.
A little bit about the Constitution. Many in here have heard me speak
about this over the years about the Constitution. The Framers of the
Constitution grappled with the question about how wars should begin,
and they grappled with the question in a most unusual way.
In the Constitution of 1787, the article I power is the
congressional, the legislative power, and the article II power is the
executive power. The Framers of the Constitution split war powers into
a legislative responsibility and an executive responsibility. The
legislative responsibility is clear: Congress declares war. It is in
article I. The executive responsibility is to be the Commander in
Chief. Once Congress--535 people--has declared war, you don't need 535
Commanders in Chief. That would lead to chaos. So a war once declared
by a debate and vote by the people's elected body then gets handed to
the President, who as Commander in Chief is responsible for executing
on that declaration.
The Framers of the Constitution did understand one thing about the
President's power, which is the President as Commander in Chief should
defend the Nation. The President always has the ability to defend the
United States without asking Congress's permission.
Back in 1787, Congress might adjourn and ride horseback back to
Vermont. What if the United States were attacked? You couldn't wait for
all of Congress to come back to enable the United States to defend
itself. So a President has the inherent power under article II to
defend the United States without asking for permission. But it has been
the understanding since the very beginning of this Republic that, if it
is more than defending the United States--if it is going on offense in
any
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way--congressional authorization is needed.
It is so rare. In other countries and at other times, war has been
for the Executive. It has been for the King. It has been for the
Emperor. It has been for the Monarch. It has been for the Czar. It has
been for the Sultan. But in the United States, we made a very careful
choice to do it differently, and that choice was described most
eloquently in a letter from the main drafter of the Constitution James
Madison to President Thomas Jefferson. Actually, he was not yet
President. This letter was dated April 2, 1798, and James Madison
described what were they getting at when they vested the power to
declare war with Congress.
Here is what James Madison wrote:
The constitution supposes, what the History of all
Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of
power most interested in war, and most prone to it. [Our
Constitution] has accordingly with studied care, vested the
question of war in the Legislature.
Other countries don't do this, but the Framers of our Constitution in
1787 decided we are going to be different. Before we send troops into
harm's way where they could be killed, where they could be injured,
where they could see people they love and their colleagues killed and
injured--before we are going to send troops in harm's way in war, we
want to see the people's elected bodies--both Houses--have a debate
about what the stakes are and whether we should force our troops into
harm's way and potentially lose their lives, and that debate will be in
full view of the American public so the American public can understand
what is at stake, and then they can call their Representatives or write
them a letter and tell them what they think about whether war is
necessary and whether the sacrifice we ask of our troops should be the
ultimate sacrifice that we are often asking of them in war.
That has been the Constitution since 1787. The Constitution has been
amended, probably, in 25 or 26 amendments now. That has never been
amended. That has never been amended.
In 1974, Congress grappled with a challenging problem and passed the
War Powers Resolution of 1974. What was the problem?
The problem in 1974 was this: A President began war without telling
Congress. In 1974, we were in the midst of the Vietnam war. Congress
did know that, and Congress had passed some legislation at least
appropriating funds for it and somewhat authorizing it during the
Johnson administration. Congress knew about the war in Vietnam.
Obviously, there was a draft, and 56,000 Americans were killed in
that war. But President Nixon, without informing Congress, extended the
war and started bombing Cambodia--it was called the secret bombing of
Cambodia--a new country that had not been covered by war
authorizations. So Congress stepped up and acted and passed the War
Powers Resolution of 1974.
That resolution did a number of things. It established some protocols
for when the President initiates military action, providing notice to
Congress so that there can't be a secret war; giving Congress some
ability, once notice is provided, to try to withdraw notice if it
thinks that the war is ill-advised.
But the War Powers Resolution also did something else: It gave the
power to even one Member of Congress, one Senator or one House Member,
if a President initiates war or is on the verge of initiating war--the
War Powers Resolution gave to one Senator, one Congressman, the ability
to file a resolution to stop a war before it starts or to stop a war
once it started.
The War Powers Resolution over time has made that a privileged
motion, meaning it can bypass committee and be brought up on the floor
of the Senate for a vote within an expeditious period of time.
A privileged motion is one that sort of elbows everything else out of
the way because Congress has judged that the matter is so important
that it should take precedence over normal committee proceedings and it
should be considered in a prompt fashion. It is a simple majority vote,
not subject to filibuster and cloture. It can't be buried in a
committee. It has to be debated on the floor. It is amendable. It can
be amended.
But as long as you meet the criteria, the privileged criteria, under
the War Powers Resolution of 1974, you are entitled to try to stop a
war before it starts. The criteria that you have to meet to have the
privilege are two:
One, hostilities between the United States and another actor nation--
Iran in this case--have to either be underway or they have to be
imminent. That has to be the case. You can't just say: I want to stop a
war that no one has contemplated and nothing is happening. So you have
to demonstrate imminence. You also have to show that there is no
existing congressional authorization authorizing the United States to
be at war--in this case, with Iran. That second criteria has been met.
We had a similar resolution on the floor a few years ago following
the U.S strike that killed the Iranian military leader Soleimani, and
the ruling of the Parliamentarian and really the acknowledgement of the
body was that there was no current congressional authorization
authorizing war against Iran.
So the question is, Is the imminence standard met? I would argue that
it clearly is. The United States is already using U.S. weaponry to
knock down Iranian missiles. That is more than imminence; that is
actual kinetic hostility.
The United States is being urged to enter the war. The United States
is moving military assets into the region and withdrawing diplomats
from the region.
The Iranians are acknowledging that: If the United States enters the
war, we have plans to go after U.S. troops, the 40,000 U.S. troops in
the area.
Since Congress clearly wanted a Member to be able to file such a
motion to be heard before a war begins, I believe the imminence
standard is clearly met in this case with actual kinetic activity
between U.S. weaponry and Iranians.
So over the course of the next few days, you will likely hear me talk
more than once about the need for Congress to stand up and say there
shall not be a war against Iran without a congressional vote. It is a
pretty simple proposition: No U.S. war against Iran without a
congressional vote.
Let me answer a couple of questions that colleagues of mine have
asked about the resolution that I filed yesterday.
First, what about self-defense? What about if Iran does take action
against the United States, the homeland, or at a U.S. base in the
Middle East or at a U.S. consulate in Erbil in the Kurdish area of
Iraq? What if Iran takes action against the United States?
The answer is pretty straightforward: Under the Constitution, the
President can defend the United States, and the President doesn't need
Congress to do that. So if there is an Iranian attack on the United
States, the President can and has said he will--and I would strongly
support him, as I know everyone in this body would--defend U.S.
interests against an Iranian attack.
So the self-defense question is mentioned in the resolution. The
resolution says: Nothing in this resolution will block the ability of
the United States to take legal action to defend itself, and that is
clearly contemplated by article II.
The second question I am asked is, What about the United States
helping Israel defend itself?
I have been here since January of 2013. I have voted for every Israel
defense package that has ever been before this body, and there have
been many. Israel receives more defense aid from the United States than
any other nation year after year after year with my support. And I have
done more than vote for Israel defense aid; on a couple of instances, I
have whipped votes to make sure that we found enough aid for Israel.
In April of last year, we passed a supplemental bill in this body
that had billions of dollars of aid for Israel in the aftermath of the
horrific attacks on Israel by Hamas on October 7. It was shortly after
that vote that Iran launched a set of attacks against Israel.
The defense aid that the United States provided enabled us to knock
down and assist Israel in knocking down Iranian drones and missiles.
That was a good thing. Had those drones and
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missiles landed in Israel, they would have not only killed and wounded
tons of civilians, but they would have led to escalation in the region
that would have been unhelpful for all countries in the region.
So I stand strong for Israel's right to defend itself, and I stand
strong for the United States in providing Israel support so that they
can defend themselves, but that is a different question. That is a
different question than whether the United States should go to war with
Iran.
In my view, there is no compelling security reason for the United
States to go to war with Iran.
The last question that I want to ask and sort of reflect upon before
concluding is this: What about diplomacy? What about diplomacy?
The pages are here. You have a lot of time on the floor. Sometimes
there are speeches, and sometimes there aren't, and I imagine you have
looked a lot in this room and what is in the room. One of the things
you have noticed is that in the panels--all around the room, the blue
panels--at the top of the panel is the seal of the United States. That
seal of the United States was designed and embraced by the United
States in 1782. The seal of the United States is also in the skylight
in the ceiling of the Senate Chamber, and that seal has essentially
been constant since 1782. There is a seal of the President of the
United States that has changed a little bit, but the seal of the United
States that Congress has used has been constant since 1782.
One thing that is very notable about the seal is the eagle and two
claws holding the arrows of war and the olive branches of peace. But
since the very beginning of this Republic, the eagle's face has been
turned to the olive branches of peace. It was designed that way to send
a symbol that the United States always prefers peace, always prefers
diplomacy, and only uses war as a last resort when diplomacy fails.
We had a diplomatic deal with Iran that was entered into in 2015 that
was limiting their nuclear program--peacefully, without having to bomb
them, without having to kill civilians, without having to assassinate
scientists.
The United States, together with other nations, used the power of
congressional sanctions--Congress did this well--to leverage an
agreement whereby Iran agreed--in the first sentence of the first
paragraph of the first page of the agreement, Iran reaffirmed that it
would ``never seek to purchase, acquire, or develop nuclear weapons.''
In the body of that agreement, Iran agreed to a whole series of
limitations upon nuclear research, nuclear activity, centrifuge
construction, and the percentage of enriched uranium it was allowed to
have. Also, Iran agreed to the most comprehensive inspection regime of
any nation on the planet, overseen by the International Atomic Energy
Agency, to ensure that they were meeting their requirements that they
would never seek to purchase, acquire, and develop nuclear weapons and
that they would abide by their limits on centrifuges and the limits on
enriched uranium and other activities.
The agreement was working. Don't take it from Senator Kaine; the
International Atomic Energy Association said the agreement was working.
The allies and adversaries--Russia and China--were part of this deal,
as were the UK and France and Germany. Those who worked on the deal
said the agreement was working. It wasn't turning Iran from a bad actor
to a good actor. It wasn't stopping all of Iran's bellicose behavior.
But it was limiting the very nuclear program that is now trying to be
bombed out of existence. We had an agreement that was working.
President Trump became President in January of 2017, and he said: I
don't like the agreement that President Obama did. I want to get out of
it.
President Trump's own Cabinet--his Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis
said: Don't get out of this agreement. It is working.
His Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said: Don't get out of this
agreement. It is working.
His National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, a former general, said:
Don't get out of this agreement. It is working.
For God's sake, we have used diplomacy just as we are supposed to--by
preferring peace and diplomacy first--to deprive Iran of a path to a
nuclear weapon. Shouldn't we prefer diplomacy rather than putting at
risk the lives of American troops, the 40,000 troops who are in the
Middle East?
So what happened to the diplomatic agreement? President Trump started
to talk about abandoning it.
I wrote a piece in Time magazine in 2017, and I said: If you abandon
this agreement when it is working, what will Iran do? They will go back
to developing nuclear weapons, because if the United States backs out
of it, they will as well.
If you abandon this agreement, North Korea will never do a nuclear
deal with the United States because why do a deal with the United
States if the United States is going to abandon the deal even when it
is working?
President Trump didn't listen to me. He didn't listen to his
Secretary of State. He didn't listen to his Secretary of Defense. He
didn't listen to a lot of people in his administration. He tore the
deal up. What a tragedy.
You have Israeli civilians who have been killed in the Iranian
missile attacks who have nothing to do with the military and Iranian
civilians who have been killed in missile attacks who have nothing to
do with the military. They would be alive today and 40,000 U.S. troops
in the region would be safe today if we had decided to act in accord
with our values and put diplomacy first and put peace over war.
That is water under the bridge. But the question for this body that
we will grapple with over the course of the next couple of weeks is
whether the United States should be in another war in the Middle East--
in particular, whether we should allow a war to start without us,
whether we should hide in the tall grass rather than exercise our
constitutional responsibility under article I.
This is fundamentally a debate about Congress being true to its oath
of office and actually also being true to the obligations we have to
our public.
The Framers put this in the Constitution so that we wouldn't be at
war without a debate in front of the public. They had a view about the
morality of war, and I think their view was basically this: There would
be nothing more publicly immoral, in the public space, than to send
troops into harm's way, risking death, if Congress was too chicken to
have a debate and vote about whether the war was in the national
interest.
If we had that debate and we decide that war is in the national
interest, then the troops go into war knowing that the civilian
leadership of this country have had the hard debate in view of the
American public and decided that the stakes are sufficient to ask
people to make the ultimate sacrifice.
But how dare we--how dare we--and I say this as the father of a U.S.
marine: How dare we ask people to make the ultimate sacrifice if we
don't have the guts to have a debate and decide whether a war is in the
interest of this country?
I know what the American public thinks about this. There was a poll
that was released today, and this is completely consistent with what I
have heard from Virginians. And Virginia is one of the most pro-
military States in this country. I am on the Armed Services Committee.
One out of every eight Virginians is a veteran. That is not one out of
every eight adults; that is one out of every eight Virginians is a
veteran--and you add Active Duty, you add the Guard, you add the
Reserve, and you add the civilian DOD and the military contractors and
their families. We train all the Marine officers in the world. We have
the biggest shipbuilding enterprise in the world. We have the Pentagon,
the largest military office in the world. We have been the site of more
battles on U.S. soil than any State in this country, in Virginia: the
Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the attack on 9/11 at the Pentagon.
We are as pro-military a State as there is, but I can tell you this:
Virginians do not believe the United States should be in another war in
the Middle East. Neither do Americans.
A poll today suggests 16 percent of Americans think the U.S. military
should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran--one-sixth,
16 percent--60 percent say we should not; 24 percent are not sure.
We need to have this debate in front of the American public and let
them
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watch us debate the stakes of this. And it might be that colleagues in
this body or in the House think a war with Iran is a good idea. Let
them put a war authorization on the table. Let's debate that. Let's
debate that in front of Virginians and Kansans and Californians and
hear what our constituents have to say. Let's debate that in the full
view of people whose spouses are in the military or whose kids are in
the military. Let's have that debate in front of them and hear what
they think before we cast a vote that would be one of the most serious
votes that you ever cast on the floor of a body like this.
But we should not allow a war of the magnitude of this to begin with
Congress hiding from the responsibility that was put on Congress's
shoulders in 1787.
I will be asking my colleagues to support my simple resolution as
early as next week: No war without a vote of Congress. I will be asking
my colleagues to support it and uphold the oath we have all taken to
support the Constitution that established that most unusual principle,
most unique principle, that is part of what makes this Nation special.
With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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