[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 11897]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            UP OR DOWN VOTE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Madam Speaker, I rise to call for an up or down vote 
on a timetable for getting U.S. soldiers out of Iraq. Simple, 
straightforward and to the point.
  Do we stay or do we redeploy?
  All this talk about benchmarks is a diversionary tactic by the 
administration to keep making war. Last November, the American people 
elected Democrats for one reason above all others, to get U.S. soldiers 
out of Iraq and get Americans out of the Iraq war.
  The American people have given up on the credibility of the 
President. Every week another poll confirms another vote of no 
confidence by the American people against this President. In a new 
poll, the Americans disapprove of the President's handling of the Iraq 
war by a two to one margin.
  Newsweek magazine has the President's approval ratings even lower. 
Nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe the President's actions in Iraq show 
he is stubborn and unwilling to admit his mistakes.
  In USA Today, nearly 80 percent don't believe the President's 
assertion that a U.S. presence in Iraq is preventing terror attacks 
here at home.
  The American people get it. Nothing good comes from being in Iraq, 
and nothing worse will happen by leaving Iraq.
  The American people have issued orders, but the President refuses to 
redeploy his thinking. More U.S. soldiers and more Iraqi civilians are 
dying every day. Iraqi children are being traumatized every day by the 
sight of dead bodies in the street. Over a million Iraqi civilians have 
fled to Jordan and Syria, where the refugee crisis grows by the hour.
  And the President's plan to address this reality is spending more 
money building concrete walls in Baghdad. Walling in the Iraqi people 
isn't going to solve anything and may, in fact, worsen the ethnic 
cleansing that is essentially a part of a civil war raging throughout 
the country.
  How ironic that a Republican President authorizes building concrete 
walls to contain and separate Iraqi people. The Soviets tried it in 
Berlin, and it wasn't many years later that Ronald Reagan, a Republican 
President, told Gorbachev, ``Tear down this wall.''
  Iraqi leaders are demanding that the U.S. stop building walls that 
are in effect concrete jail cells, locking up innocent Iraqi citizens 
and making them easy prey for more attacks. It may be their country, 
but that doesn't matter to this White House.
  By yesterday, 144 Iraqi lawmakers out of 275 signed a petition 
calling for the U.S. to set a timetable to withdraw. That is a 
majority. The story broke this morning on Alternet.com, and one of the 
reporters, Joshua Holland, has broken other significant news stories 
concerning Iraq. This is the first time that over half of the duly 
elected members of the Iraqi Parliament have gone on the record 
demanding a date for U.S. withdrawal.
  Iraqi leaders want their country back, but this President isn't going 
to honor that request. The President's veto of the supplemental Iraq 
spending bill was his de facto military escalation of the war, a 
declaration that he intends to keep making declarations of war, not 
peace, and the President's veto was his rejection of working with the 
Congress to end the Iraq war.
  A war with benchmarks is still a war. A war with benchmarks in this 
administration is a war without end. The only benchmark this 
administration will understand is an up-or-down vote on the Iraq war. 
And we have been promised an up-or-down vote on Iran, and we need to 
take that as well.
  Members deserve the opportunity to say with their vote what they 
think and what we are hearing back home from our constituents. Unless 
we do the job the American people elected us to do, the President won't 
be the only one getting a vote of no confidence.
  The people have spoken and spoken. In the People's House, it is time 
we accept the will of the American people. Schedule an up-or-down vote 
on setting a timetable for getting U.S. soldiers out of Iraq.

{time}  2015

                          ____________________